Marielle de Dardel, wife of the Swiss Ambassador to China, is an active member of the Swiss-China Society. Photo: Yin Yeping/GT

Every time Marielle de Dardel has visited China from her native Switzerland over the years, she has always been amazed by how much it has changed. As an active member of the Swiss-China Society, Dardel's passion for and understanding of China is no less than that of her husband, Jean-Jacques de Dardel, the Swiss Ambassador to China.

The Global Times recently sat with Mrs Dardel at the Swiss Embassy in Beijing to hear her views about China.

Dardel's first encounter with China came when she was a little girl. Dardel's grandmother was a great lover of art, and had a glass cabinet filled with porcelain. "I asked her what it was and she told me that was china," she recalled. "That was with the first thing I ever heard about China as a little girl."

This early spark of interest later led Dardel to read voraciously about China and study its art history. "It was very addictive," she said. In the late 1980s she made her first visit - it was a time, she said, when few people in the West were engaging culturally with China.

However, the more she's learned about China, she said, the less she feels she knows. She can't abide by visitors who draw simple conclusions about China after a trip of only a week or two. "You cannot understand China using your own parameters - you need to understand its history first," she said.

Dardel is dedicated to communicating the idea that China is larger and more complicated than most people know. "I want to help people understand how diverse China is and the richness that diversity brings."

Dardel embraces the rapid changes that China has undergone since she first took interest in it. When she first visited China in the 1980s, China was behind the Western world in terms of consumption and quality of life, said Dardel. Yet now she finds that China has caught up in many ways.

"What the Western world can learn from China is the speed [of development] and China's ability to constantly adapt and be creative in the face of modernization," she said.

In the meantime, Dardel says living in China has brought another perk - bringing her and her husband together. "We have so much interest in everything that's new," she said. "China has opened up and changed so much over the 30 years of our marriage and of course it's a great conversation topic for us."