Hangzhou Was the China I Had Come to See
Published on HivePostify by @ivan-drazic · Sun Aug 09 2026
> I arrived knowing almost nothing about Hangzhou. Between water lilies, pagodas, Buddhist temples and old streets, I found the China I had imagined — and discovered that reality was even more captivating than I had expected.
I arrived in Hangzhou from Shanghai on the afternoon of 15 May, after less than an hour on the high-speed train from Shanghai Hongqiao to Hangzhou East. The conference was the reason for coming; the Courtyard by Marriott Hangzhou Wulin, in the modern commercial centre, would be my base. Until then, Hangzhou had existed in my plans almost entirely as a logistical necessity. I had chosen Shanghai for the international flights, and Hangzhou was simply where I needed to be next. I stepped off the train having done remarkably little research and with almost no idea what kind of city was waiting for me.
In retrospect, that ignorance seems almost absurd. Hangzhou is not simply a large modern Chinese city. In 1138, after the Song court had been driven south from northern China, Hangzhou became the imperial capital under the name Lin’an and remained so for more than a century. From Lin’an, the Southern Song ruled much of southern China through one of the most prosperous and culturally sophisticated periods of Chinese history. Even after the Southern Song fell to the Mongols in the late thirteenth century, Hangzhou remained an important centre of trade, helped by its position at the southern end of the Grand Canal, the vast waterway linking northern and southern China. Today, Hangzhou is home to Alibaba, the technology giant best known for e-commerce, cloud services and digital platforms, and has become one of China’s major centres for the digital economy and artificial intelligence.
And I had arrived knowing almost none of it.
Leifeng Pagoda rising above West Lake — one of the most recognisable symbols of Hangzhou.
Table of contents West Lake Finally, China Down the hill to Wushan Night Market A museum, a pagoda and the place between them Leifeng Pagoda — A Legacy from Before Hangzhou Became Lin’an A Tenth-Century Pagoda Completed in 2002 The Buddhist temple that lost to the temperature A white snake beneath Leifeng The one place that still wanted cash Three Pools Mirroring the Moon Pagodas in the afternoon, Chanel at night The capital hidden under the modern city Eight centuries of shopping The green doors More China than Shanghai
West Lake
With the afternoon still free, I left the Courtyard on foot and headed south towards West Lake, the only sight I intended to visit that evening. From Wulin it was an easy walk through the city to the eastern shore, and the lake seemed the obvious place to begin exploring Hangzhou.
Calling West Lake a single attraction is slightly misleading. The lake itself covers about 6.5 square kilometres, but what makes it exceptional is the much larger landscape that has grown around it: wooded hills, causeways, islands, pagodas, Buddhist temples, gardens and pavilions shaped together over more than a thousand years. In 2011, UNESCO recognised the entire West Lake Cultural Landscape as a World Heritage Site. The point was not simply that the lake was beautiful. For centuries, people had been actively shaping that beauty — dredging the water, creating islands and causeways, planting trees and placing temples, pagodas and pavilions so that architecture and nature became part of the same composition.
A particularly Chinese expression of this idea is the tradition known as the Ten Scenes of West Lake. Despite the name, it was never simply an ancient tourist “top ten”. First established during the Southern Song period, each scene combines a particular place with the conditions in which it was considered most beautiful — a season, a time of day, weather, sound or quality of light. Leifeng Pagoda in Evening Glow is therefore not just a pagoda, but a pagoda seen as part of an evening landscape; Evening Bell Ringing at Nanping Hill is as much about the sound of Jingci Temple’s bell travelling across the lake as it is about the place itself. Others evoke spring on Su Causeway, lotus flowers, autumn moonlight and snow on Broken Bridge. Over the following days I would encounter several of these places without initially realising that people had been admiring essentially the same combinations of water, architecture, vegetation and atmosphere for centuries.
West Lake is not a place you really understand from one viewpoint. You walk its shores, cross its causeways, climb the surrounding hills and, sooner or later, take a boat out onto the water. I would do all of that two days later. That first evening, however, my plan was much simpler: reach the lake, see what I could see, and walk back to the hotel.
An illuminated traditional-style pleasure boat on West Lake during my first evening in Hangzhou.
By the time I reached the shore, almost everything had disappeared into darkness. People were still strolling along the waterfront and the lights of the city were close behind me, but the landscape itself was mostly invisible. Then, out on the black water, a traditional pleasure boat appeared in a blaze of light.
It was almost ridiculously satisfying.
Shanghai had already impressed me enormously, but its international character and European architecture had made my first encounter with China rather different from the images I had carried with me for years. That glowing boat, however clichéd it may sound, was the first moment when something clicked. There it was: a fragment of the China I had imagined before coming here.
The lake itself would have to wait for daylight. But Hangzhou had already begun to work on me.
Finally, China
The next day belonged largely to the conference. By the time the formal programme and dinner were over, however, there was still enough evening left for one proper excursion. I took a taxi to Wushan Hill, immediately south-east of West Lake, where Chenghuang Pavilion rises above the trees. The moment it appeared, illuminated in red and gold against the dark hillside, something finally fell into place.
My first proper encounter with Hangzhou’s more traditional side — at Chenghuang Pavilion on Wushan Hill.
With its tiered roofs, elaborate eaves and saturated colours, the pavilion looked convincingly ancient. It is not. The present Chenghuang Pavilion was completed only in 2000, on the site of Hangzhou’s former City God Temple. Chenghuang means City God, a protective deity from Chinese folk religion, a tradition that blended local beliefs with elements of Daoism, Buddhism and Confucian ideas. In Hangzhou, that tradition became closely linked to Zhou Xin, a Ming official remembered for his integrity and sense of justice.
The building I had entered, however, was not really a temple. Today it is a paid cultural and sightseeing attraction, built in a deliberately historic style and used for exhibitions, panoramic viewing, tea, performances and other events. A memorial temple dedicated to Zhou Xin survives within the wider complex, but the great illuminated pavilion above it is essentially a modern celebration of Hangzhou’s history and traditions.
That explained something I had noticed while walking through it: for all its religious symbolism and ancient appearance, parts of the building felt almost like an elegant cultural venue rather than a sacred space. They were.
That mixture of ancient meaning and surprisingly recent construction was something I would encounter repeatedly in Hangzhou.
Impressive as the pavilion was, the real reward of Wushan Hill was the view. From the terraces, Hangzhou and West Lake opened up below me, their lights scattered between dark hills and stretches of almost black water.
Night over West Lake, with Hangzhou shimmering in the distance.
Far across the lake, a single glowing pagoda rose above the southern shore. I photographed it several times, having no idea that the following day I would be standing directly beneath it.
Leifeng Pagoda illuminated across West Lake from Wushan Hill
But that evening, its name hardly mattered. What mattered was the whole scene: the dark lake, the hills, the glowing roofs and the city spreading beyond them. The fragment I had glimpsed the night before had suddenly become a landscape.
This time there was no hesitation. This was the China I had come hoping to find.
Down the hill to Wushan Night Market
From the pavilion I continued downhill towards Wushan Night Market. Despite the name, the market is not actually on Wushan Hill but in the streets below it, around Renhe and Huixing Roads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWi9IfXPwMI
Wushan Night Market after dark, where bright shopfronts and evening crowds take over the streets below the hill.
It struck me as a surprisingly good compromise between a local market and a tourist attraction. Tourism clearly dominated, but not so completely that the place felt staged. Stalls sold clothes, food, tea, souvenirs and everyday goods, while enough local shoppers moved among the visitors to keep it from becoming just another tourist shopping street.
I bought some green tea and, for myself, a silk scarf. More memorable was the durian. Its reputation had reached me long before its smell had, and I vaguely remembered stories about it being “banned”. The fruit itself is not generally illegal, of course; it is the notorious smell that gets it barred from many hotels and enclosed forms of public transport across Asia. Nobody around me appeared remotely troubled by this. People were buying it quite happily.
I decided cultural immersion did not require participation in everything.
By the end of the evening, Hangzhou had changed character completely. The dark lake of the night before now had hills, glowing roofs, a distant pagoda and crowded streets below them. The city that had seemed almost anonymous when I arrived was beginning to reveal itself.
A wall of glowing lanterns at Wushan Night Market — one of those small details that suddenly made China feel exactly as I had imagined it.
A museum, a pagoda and the place between them
The following morning began at the China National Silk Museum, which became important enough to deserve a separate story. From there I intended to walk directly to Leifeng Pagoda. On the map the distance looked manageable; what I had not expected was that the walk between the two would become one of my favourite parts of Hangzhou.
China National Silk Museum
Read "The Silk I Didn’t Know I Came For" on TravelFeed
Soon after leaving the museum, I entered a green network of narrow waterways, wetlands and paths almost swallowed by vegetation. Water lilies floated across the surface, larger leaves rose above the water further away, and channels disappeared beneath layers of green. Almost nothing in the view suggested that I was still inside one of China’s largest cities.
Changqiao Creek Water Ecological Restoration Park
At the time, I mentally filed almost everything growing in the water under one convenient label: lotus. It seemed obvious. If there was one flower that belonged in the China I had imagined before the trip, surely it was the lotus.
The photographs later proved that my botany needed some work. Lotuses and water lilies are not the same plant at all. Water lilies belong to the genus Nymphaea: their rounded leaves usually float directly on the surface and have a characteristic slit running towards the centre, while their flowers sit on or just above the water. The sacred lotus, Nelumbo nucifera, behaves differently. Its large, almost perfectly round leaves have no such slit and often rise well above the water on long stalks; the flowers do the same.
Looking back at my photographs, I had actually been walking through both. The pink and white flowers resting among floating leaves were water lilies, while elsewhere large stands of lotus leaves were already lifting themselves above the ponds.
Water lilies along Changqiao Creek
My confusion was not entirely accidental. Of the two plants, the lotus occupies a particularly deep place in Chinese culture. In Buddhist imagery, its ability to rise clean from muddy water made it a powerful symbol of purity. Over centuries it also came to represent qualities such as integrity and elegance, appearing repeatedly in Chinese painting, ceramics, textiles, poetry and religious art.
Water lilies in bloom, with lotus leaves rising behind them — two plants I had initially assumed were the same.
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