Wu an! Don’t let my three heads fool you, or that slight odor of pigs – I am Jun Di, and I have traveled to this mortal sphere to guide you to one of China’s oldest and most beautiful cities – Hangzhou. (The silly British used to pronounce it “HangChow”, can you imagine? Such barbarians but then, most cultures are primitive next to ours!)

I will be happy to guide you, if you will follow my chariot drawn by my seven pigs – Sleepy, Doc, Dopey, Grumpy…well, you get the idea. Why pigs? Why not? They are intelligent animals, self-sufficient, and they can be recycled. We Chinese believe in practical deities!

We have a Chinese saying: Born in Suzhou, live in Hangzhou, eat in Guangzhou, die in Liuzhou. This means Hangzhou is the best of all cities in which to live well. I will show you why.

Situated in a plain midway down the length of the great Yangtse River, Hangzhou is thousands of years old, probably because rice grows very well here. The true staff of life. On the map we are in eastern China, in Zhejiang Province. The first city on this site was built during the Qin dynasty, over 2,000 years ago. I believe your Greece and Rome were “civilized” then. No one is quite sure how Hangzhou came to be built on the shores of a beautiful lake, but for many centuries the West Lake – we call it Xi Hu, which curls for twelve kilometers around the western edge of the city – has brought beauty and all the joys of water, from crops to fountains, delicate bridges to island gardens, to the heart of the city. It is fed by an entire series of waterways, canals, rivers and streams that make the sound of running water heard everywhere.

O the tales of Xi Hu! Our tales tell of the poet, Bai Juyi, who governed Hanzghou for one of the Tang Emperors in your late eighth century. He realized that the great dyke that filled the West Lake had been allowed to collapse, and the farmer’s crops were dying of drought. He built a far greater dyke and raised the lake levels so that the farmers became wealthy. He loved the lake so much, he visited it every day, built a causeway linking the Broken Bridge with Solitary Hill and planted peach and willow trees along the dyke. Later governors planted more gardens and trees, so what you see now are the descendants of gardens many hundreds of years old!

Take a look about you. For centuries Hangzhou has focused on building gardens, bridges and piers so that all may share the “ten scenes” of our Lake. What are they? They each have a phrase expressing the essence of each view – and in our hot, sultry summers, nothing is more popular than excursions on the lake, which lets the summer city breathe. Our scenes are:

Spring Dawn on the Su Causeway

Viewing Fish at Flower Pond

Winery Yard and Lotus Pool

Evening Bell ringing at the Nanping Hill

Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake

Leifeng Pagoda in Evening Glow

Three Pools mirroring the Moon

Lingering Snow on the Broken Bridge

Twin Peaks Piercing the Clouds

As you can see, there are many small temples and tea houses along the sides of Xi Chu, so while you rest and enjoy your Longjing green tea, let me tell you a bit about the history of our city.

Hangzhou first began to be known as a trading city around 2,200 years ago. Once one of the Seven Ancient Capitals of China, its great wall was built during the Sui Dynasty in 591 AD. It was the capital of the Wuyue Kingdom for 200 years, during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period. The city was again a capital of China during the Southern Song Dynasty and perhaps reached the zenith of its power in the period just before China was invaded by the Mongols.

The city was then known as Lin’an, and our historians say there may have been as many as nearly half a million citizens living here by the year 1200. The town spread well beyond its ancient, mighty walls, and trade led to thousands of ambitious peasants coming to the city to better their lives. But in 1276, when the Mongols came, the Court fled to Guandong. By then, they say that nearly a million people lived in Hangzhou, making it the most populous city in the world in those ancient days. Though it was no longer a capital, Italian explorer Marco Polo found it a beautiful city even after the Mongol conquest. During the years of the great Kublai Khan, a hundred years after the Mongol conquest, Polo could still write that, “[It is] beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world. The number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of goods that passed through their hands, was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate…."

Hangzhou was lucky. It survived the Mongol conquest and continued building its trade and wealth. The city was beautiful, but it had tens of thousands of houses built – of wood! And as you can imagine, that meant great fires. In one of the biggest fires in the 13th century, they say more than 30,000 homes were burned to the ground: far more than the entire population of your Paris and London combined! Of course, with the West Lake so close, at least there was always water for fire-fighting; but the government dared not risk so precious a jewel again. It built watchtowers and devised a system of lantern and flag signals to define where fires began and route more than 3,000 soldiers to put them out!

Hangzhou was also a great port on the Yangtze River, until the silt from the river began to fill in the harbor in the Ming Dynasty period. Now we do not have so much river commerce, but rather the sail and houseboats of those who can afford to maintain them sailing merrily on Xi Hu.

Have you finished your tea? Perhaps you will come with me now to see beautiful Xi Hu itself. Yes, the district is open for settlement, but I must warn you – it is very, very beautiful, and that makes it very, very dear. Do you have a city counselor in your family? Otherwise, you must negotiate your own arrangements. Who would not want to live in Xi Hu?

But perhaps you prefer gardens? Then the lovely suburb of Suzhou is ideal. While Xi Hu has its lake, Suzhou has its famous planned gardens and canals, where golden blossoms gently fall and drift along the calm waterways and everyone travels by boat. As you enter the inner city through the towering city walls, the boats slide into the “water gates.” Silk and gardens – we plant meticulously designed gardens and spin and export the most beautiful silk in China, and you might say war is our hobby – but ONLY a hobby. The great scholar and general, Sun Tsu, lived in a modest house in Suzhou with the most exquisite gardens, where he pondered the truth of war while smelling fragrant flowers.

If you love both flowers and water, you have yet a third choice – the district of the Grand Canal, which travels from north to south in China and is longer than any canal in the world. We have many names for it: Yu-ho (Imperial River), Yun-ho (Transport River), and Yunliang-ho (Tribute-bearing River). Our people literally live on the river. As I am believed to be a patron of seafarers, I include this great waterway as well, so you will have my blessing!

Imagine living on a small junk or houseboat tied to the mooring stones along the Canal. Great stone walls protect the waterway. If you traveled it from top to bottom, you would find it controls five rivers and has 24 locks and 60 bridges! You can see China as it should be seen: in slow restfulness as the current quietly moves you from one intriguing region of China to the next. Come back to Hangzhou; leave for Louyang or Beijing; laugh at the bustling merchants traveling to and fro along the Imperial Road that runs parallel to the Canal. Meanwhile, you are laying down, sipping tea and watching China go by!

I have always had a soft spot for Hangzhou – perhaps because water and gardens bless and bring peace to any city, and no city has as much of these as Hangzhou.

Now I see you are no longer worried about my three faces, for they look forward, backward and beyond, as does Hangzhou. And remember, this is the Year of the Pig in China, so I expect your prayers and offerings for good fortune in the year ahead! I hope you will spend it in lovely Hangzhou.

SOURCES

Wikipedia/Hangzhou

Ten Scenes of Hangzhou

Hangzhou, Capital of Zeijiang Province

The West Lake of Hangzhou

IMAGE CREDITS:

Flower image by sjiong
Hangzhou House by Carol Sawada
Hangzhou perspective by Filipe Fortes
Hangzhou Chinese Gardens by tiarescott

They are all used under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license


Note: You can hear how various Chinese greetings – like Wu An – sound in Chinese at the Yuanh AudioChinese greeting site.

City-builders: Kutulun Khan
Shanti Ashoka
Jia Li Shen Chi