West Lake
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The lake last froze over completely in January 1977, when Hangzhou recorded a low of −8.6 °C.
- Marco Polo described the lake in his book, claiming a circuit of some 30 miles lined with palaces and mansions.
- Su Shi was the first to use the name West Lake in an official document, his 1090 petition to the court to dredge it.
- Sixteenth-century scholars counted about 35 other lakes in China called West Lake, and judged Hangzhou's the most famous of them all.
- The alternating pattern of one willow and one peach tree along the Su and Bai causeways goes back to Su Shi's 11th-century planting.
- Qing emperors were so taken with the lake that imperial gardens in Beijing, including the Old Summer Palace, imitated its scenery.
- The Kangxi Emperor inscribed titles for the Ten Scenes, and the Qianlong Emperor later carved his own poems on the backs of the same stelae.
- Wenlan Pavilion on Gushan, built in 1784, was one of the libraries made to house the vast imperial encyclopedia Siku Quanshu.
- The general Yue Fei, executed in 1142 and later rehabilitated as a national hero, was reburied in a tomb on the lake's shore.
- Around the lake grow 125 trees of 22 species that are more than 300 years old.
Why it is worth it
West Lake, Xihu, lies on the western edge of old Hangzhou, a sheet of shallow water framed on three sides by gentle wooded hills and on the fourth by the city. It is one of the most influential landscapes in East Asia: a place that poets, painters and garden designers in China, and later in Japan, took as a model of how nature and human work can be composed into a single picture. It was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape in 2011, and the scenic area around it was among the first major attractions in China to abolish admission fees.
The lake is as much made as found. It began as a shallow bay of the Qiantang River that silted into a lagoon, and it has survived as open water only because it has been dredged again and again for well over a thousand years. The dredged silt built its most famous features: the Bai Causeway, named in memory of the Tang poet Bai Juyi, who dredged the lake in 822, and the Su Causeway, built in 1089 by the Song poet Su Shi, who also compared the lake to the legendary beauty Xi Shi. Under the Wuyue kingdom and the Southern Song, when Hangzhou was the imperial capital, temples, pagodas and villas multiplied around the shores, and the Song invented the idea of the "Ten Scenes of West Lake", a set of named views tied to season and time of day that Qing emperors later inscribed on stelae.
The lake is often summed up as one hill, two pagodas, three islets and four causeways. The hill is Gushan, the only natural island, joined to the shore by the Bai Causeway. The pagodas are the slender Baochu Pagoda on the northern hills and the Leifeng Pagoda on the southern shore, linked to the legend of the White Snake and rebuilt in 2002 after the original fell in 1924. On the artificial islet of Lesser Yingzhou, small stone pagodas rise from the water and are lit at the Mid-Autumn Festival to create the scene called Three Pools Mirroring the Moon. Local wit adds the "Three Oddities": the Broken Bridge is not broken, the Solitary Island is not solitary, and the Long Bridge is not long.
Getting there
The lake borders central Hangzhou, about 6.5 km from the point used as the city centre here. The nearest airport is Hangzhou Xiaoshan International Airport (HGH), about 27.7 km away. The shores, causeways and islands can be explored on foot, by bicycle or by boat; the scenic area is very crowded on public holidays.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
West Lake, also known as Xihu and by other names, is a freshwater lake in Hangzhou, China. Situated to the west of Hangzhou's former walled city, the lake has a surface area of 6.39 km2 (2.47 sq mi), stretching 3.2 km (2.0 mi) from north to south and 2.8 km (1.7 mi) from east to west. In the lake are four causeways, three artificial islands, and Gushan, the only natural island. Gentle hills surround the lake on its north, west, and south sides, with the Leifeng and Baochu pagodas standing in pair on the south and north banks. Several famous temples are nestled in the mountains west of the lake, including Lingyin and Jingci Temples.
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