Best of all of the garden pavilions at Drottningholm is the Chinese pavilion, a gift of King Adolf Frederik to his Queen in July 1753. Sweden was at the forefront of the China trade. William Chambers, for example, had been out three times in the 1740s – once in April 1740, again in 1743, and a third time in 1748.

Chinoiserie is traditionally treated as a source of fantasy, but this strikes me as a pretty serious attempt to reproduce the characteristics of Chinese architecture, as represented in Chambers’s Designs of Chinese Buildings, published in May 1757:-

There are two flanking pavilions:-

I loved the interiors, so beautifully atmospheric in the afternoon sun:-