Traveling Tea Set for the Royal Party.
When in Vienna in May of this year we visited The Hofburg Imperial Apartments which contain The Winter Imperial Apartments, the Royal Silver Collection and The Imperial China Collection.

Each different pattern you see in a photo, represents a different complete set of royal china to serve up to 140 royal guests.

I only photographed one example of patterns that I liked. There were many more, from all around the world, that I didn’t photograph

This museum is filled with a VAST fortune of antique china services, each to serve large numbers of guests. It also contains vast stores of silver flatware and serving pieces to go long with each china service. It seems hard to justify this type of over the top opulence, when poor people at this time had hard and difficult lives.

All the sets had coordinating center pieces and serving dishes.

The palace was home to the Hapsburgs for 600 years. The furnishings and china you see in these photos date from the early 18th century to the mid 19th century.

There are more patterns that I took sample photos of that I liked. If anyone is interested in seeing them, I will post them, but I didn’t want to bore your with too many examples.

If you were the hostess of one of these dinners, this is the dress you might wear, an actual dress worn by Empress Elizabeth.

And if you were the King Franz Joseph, this was your bedroom. I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to be taking pics here……but I did find out! So enjoy these rare photos.

Cheers to your from the decidedly Non-Imperial Holler~