I never thought I’d own a Jinhao FP one day…I had read about and seen pictures of Jinhao FPs here on FPN and was wondering how on earth am I going to get one of these fab looking pens…I browsed around the net and saw that isellpens.com sold Jinhao FPs, but I was not sure about how I’d go about ordering them from India and whether the pen would reach safely…then this happened…a friend of mine, Anuradha, was posted to China…I have known her for the past 15 years… she had come home to Hyderabad for a brief holiday and was talking about her work in China and I asked her what had she got for me from China…she said she didn’t know what I wanted and if I specified what I wanted, she’d try and get it the next time she came to India…at that moment, I didn’t know what to ask for…I told her that I’d let her know…a couple of months after she’d left, I was again browsing the net and ogling at FPs…it suddenly struck me that I can ask Anu to get me a Jinhao FP…I immediately sent her a mail, thinking that Jinhao FPs would be available in all Chinese cities and it wouldn’t be difficult to buy one…there was no response for quite some time and I again asked her whether she’d been successful in bagging a Jinhao FP…she wrote back telling me that she had tried in her city and that the shops there didn’t know that such a thing called a Jinhao pen existed…that came as a surprise to me…I then scoured the net again and saw that Jinhao has a website…almost 90% of the information available there was in Chinese, but I found the address written in English and forwarded the URL and the address to Anu…she then sent both to her colleague working in that city and asked him to buy a pen for me…As I couldn’t specify what model I wanted, and Anu too didn’t know which model to buy, it was left to the discretion of her colleague to decide and buy what he thought would make me happy…Anu told me that her colleague called her up to find out which model he should buy and described some of them to her…and said that a particular model came in with a wooden box…Anu told him to buy the one with the wooden box…and that’s how I came to proudly own this Jinhao…after Anu returned to Hyderabad, I went to her house to collect the pen…and before this Anu had called me and told me that she’d come back and that she’d come home during the weekend and give me the pen… both Shruti and I had to go to our places of work on that Sunday for some reason and Anu couldn’t come to see us…it was not until another week that I finally could see this pen…and all the while I had this feeling that if I didn’t go soon and take possession of the pen, Anu would start using it…she said so to me, and also told me over the phone that the pen was so tempting that she had half a mind to keep it with her…I was scared…and I could breathe a sigh of relief only after I could hold the box in my hands…
Now about the pen…it is a beautiful pen, no doubt about it…it shines brightly…but I don’t know the name of the model…the website and the brochure that came along with it were of no help in identifying the name, because as usual, most of it was written in Chinese…I tried isellpens.com again…there were similar looking pens, but none like this one… the only thing I know for sure is that it has a 14 kt gold nib and it writes like a dream … I haven’t filled it with ink yet… and the pen looks so rich that I need to wear it with something suitably ostentatious, which I don’t have at the moment…and therefore, it stays in its velvet pouch in the box… the box is beautiful, with its Chinese inscriptions on the lid as well as the inside lid… there is also a scroll, which actually is like a mat, made of bamboo or wood flats linked with a thread…the inscriptions on the box lid, inside lid, and on the scroll are all in Chinese, I can’t make head or tail of what is written… there is an engraving of a Chinese lady on the lid and a Chinese man on the scroll…I don’t who they are…maybe the man is Confucius… the engraving on the clip and on the cap lip is again in Chinese… there are 2 characters on the cap lip, which might stand for ‘Jinhao’… and the clip has 4 characters… and they are engraved very clearly and look very good… the feeder looks plain without any striations…and the design engraved on the nib extends to its sides too… the nib too looks very good, not too broad… and the pen has a piston filling mechanism…
When I showed this pen to my colleagues, some of them told me that they are contemplating turning into pen thieves…
Here are the photos...
The box and scroll are quite impressive too!
