Shanghai

Lamy’s Song Dynasty Safari

When in Shanghai, I like to visit Lamy stores. Unlike Lamy stores in Europe, they tend to offer lots of special editions. My best guess is that I am not only amazed by the quantity of these special editions but also by the quality.

Originally, I was trying to find two specific items: The Lamy Safari Field Green because it looks beautiful and the Hanzi nib because I want to experience how it writes. The Hanzi nib is made for writing Chinese script. I used Google Translate to translate an explanation into English, see below.

Unfortunately, the Field Green Safari was impossible to find in Shanghai: it was neither available in the Lamy stores, nor was it available on Chinese online market places. This came as a surprise because imported pens are often available via online market places at good prices – for example, it was easy and not expensive to get the uni-ball Signo Needle in Japan-exclusive colours. I also got the Pilot Custom Heritage 91 for a really good price.

Back to Lamy: On the trip to Shanghai last year, I bought three different special editions. I will write more about the Hanzi nib another time (spoiler, I got one), but today I want to show you another special edition: The Song Dynasty edition Safari in Jade White. There is also a Sky Blue version available, also very beautiful.

The Song Dynasty edition Lamy Safari

It also came with free engraving, so I made use of this offer. Below is a short video that shows how my pen got engraved. If you look at the barrel of the pen, you can see the characters appearing.

You can also see more of the pen and its packaging in the unboxing video below.

Another special edition is the Lamy Leben set, as seen in this advertising.

Pokemon sets were also still available, but I had already seen these at previous visits.

Some more impressions from this Lamy store.

I hope you liked the look at the Song Dynasty Edition Safari. You can find an overview of other Lamy Safari editions at Stationery.wiki. Please feel free to contribute to the article.

It’s always exciting to find new and unique editions when visiting Lamy stores in Shanghai. To be fair, they are usually just the same pen in a different colour, but if that colour appeals to me I am happy to add it to my collection. In this case the colour is beautiful like the griso and the cream Safari’s colour.

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Kaco Alpha gel pens

A few years ago I bought Kaco’s Alpha gel pens in Shanghai [1]Shanghai is also the city where Kaco is based. The Alpha pens are part of Kaco’s KacoGreen range.

When I asked an employee from a Kaco stall they told me that ‘green’ refers to the fact that the plastic from these pens can be recycled [2]It is rather cheeky to name something ‘green’ because it can be recycled, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the employee just made it up. Green might not mean anything here..

The pens feature a pleasant to touch rubberised grip section and there’s one of each letter and number. The letters, where most pens have the clip, prevent the pens from rolling off the table. The gel ink is black.

As I am currently clearing out I am selling these on eBay for 99p each. Figuring out postage to all countries is messy, but if you are interested and are not in the UK please contact me and I can look into what the cheapest postage is.

Below are two more videos: a funny video I found about the Kaco Alpha…

..and a video I made about some other Kaco products.

References

References
1 Shanghai is also the city where Kaco is based
2 It is rather cheeky to name something ‘green’ because it can be recycled, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the employee just made it up. Green might not mean anything here.

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Back to school, sci-fi style

In many countries back to school offers have arrived in the shops. Why not do back to school in style: Sci-Fi style – with The Wandering Earth-themed stationery.

The Wandering Earth is a novella from Liu Cixin and also a Sci-Fi movie based on the novella. As far as I know the movie can be watched on Netflix in many countries.

I first came across Liu Cixin though his Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy – when the first book The Three-Body Problem was dramatised for a German radio station. A year later the dramatisation of the trilogy’s next book The Dark Forest was broadcast on the same radio station. By that time I was so hooked that I didn’t want to wait another year so I read the English version of the final book of the trilogy (or rather I let my phone read me the ebook on my work to and from work).

M&G, a Shanghainese stationery manufacturer that made several previous appearances on bleistift.blog, approached Frant Gwo, the director of The Wandering Earth movie for this cooperation.

Grant Gwo

The Morning Light Award Series won the iF award in 2019.

The Morning Light Award Series

The Morning Light Star Universe Series is the girly high-end stationery from the Wandering Earth stationery.

The Morning Light Star Universe Series

There’s also the Morning Light Flavour Series.

The Morning Light Flavour Series

The images in this blog post has been taken from an M&G post and fall under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

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Chung Hwa in the News

Today’s edition of China Daily has a few very nice photos taken in Shanghai’s Chung Hwa factory.

Image © IC / China Daily

You can see all of the photos at

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201906/10/WS5cfdcd8ea310176577230489_1.html


You might also like the following blog posts about Chung Hwa

2012: Chung Hwa 6151
2012: Chung Hwa 6903
2019: Ordering Food? There’s a Pencil for that…

The image in this blog post has been taken from the China Daily web site. I believe that the use of the images shown in this blog post falls under “fair dealing” as described by the UK Copyright service.

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Ordering Food? There’s a Pencil for that…

The Chung Hwa Drawing Pencil 101 is still the pencil of choice in Shanghainese Dim Sum Restaurants.

In the nicer dim sum places, like here in a branch of Sue Hsiao Liu, they are of course also nicely sharpened.

If you wonder where they come from or how many a restaurant would keep: here’s this branch’s ‘secret’ stash of sharpened Chung Hwas, ready for the customers.


If you want to read more about Chung Hwa pencils – here’s a selection of related blog posts form around the web.

The 101:

Other Chung Hwa Pencils:

Ordering Food? There’s a Pencil for that… Read More »