April 17th, 2020 : Tulip Bloom

[xoxoxoBruce]

Tulips, millions of them. Beautiful, must be Holland, but that doesn’t look like the commercial growers fields, the splotches of
color are too small. That’s because it’s China.

A unique piece of Holland in China: Dafeng Holland Flower Park in Yancheng
The park is situated 250 km north of Shanghai (about a 3 hours drive) in Dafeng District of Yancheng. Although the development of the park started in 2012, the relation between Dafeng (Jiangsu Province) and the Netherlands is more than a century old, when Dutch water engineer Hendrik de Rijke developed the current typical Dutch ‘polder’ landscape as part of several desalinization projects in the early 20th century.
Dafeng Holland Flower Park was first opened to the public in 2013 and attracted over 500.000 visitors in the first weekend alone. Visitors could enjoy millions of imported Dutch tulips, as well as Dutch cuisine, culture and of course windmills. The park is currently expanding, so that visitors can have an even better ‘Holland Experience’.

I don’t hear the Dutch whining about “cultural appropriation”.

Who’s Hendrik? His daddy Johannis was a water works engineer who worked miracles in Japan during the late 1800s/early 1900s,
and was awarded the Knightly Order of the Rising Sun. Later he went to China to do a project taking 16 year old Hendrik along.
Daddy went home in 1910 and Hendrik stayed to do another project and died there of Cholera in 1919.

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