Hangzhou in a weekend



Musical fountain show

 Earlier in December I made a flying visit to Hangzhou, which I’d last visited in 1980. Then I’d stayed at the Xiling Hotel, across the street from West Lake. My room was 9 RMB a night -- less than $15. The Xiling has since been absorbed into the five star “Shangri-la,” rooms a minimum of $150. This is a good index of what’s happened to Hangzhou in thirty years. The plain streets of downtown Hangzhou ca. 1980 are neon lit and lined with high end fashion stores. Sites that have attracted tourists for centuries have been fixed up and admission charges levied.

Leifeng Pavilion, latest version

There are new sights, like the free musical fountain show on West Lake, where jets of water from a hundred nozzles accompany classical European and Chinese musical pieces.

There are old sights that have been reborn, like Leifeng Pavilion, situated at the lake’s southeast end on a hill that makes it visible all around the lake. It’s been violently destroyed and patiently rebuilt for centuries. The most recent rebuilding, in 2000, features an escalator to take visitors from the mysteriously named “Pond for Freeting the living thinge” to the hilltop, where there’s a great, if sometimes hazy, view of West Lake and the city beyond from the top deck of the pagoda.

West Lake amusements

The pond probably has some connection to one of the innumerable stories connected to the pavilion and Hangzhou, in this case the legend of Bai Suzhen, 白蛇传, Lady White Snake, an immortal who fell in love with a monk and was punished with confinement under the pagoda for eternity. All around the lake are inscriptions and monuments celebrating similar events, real or mythical, in the city’s long history.

At one end of Xilin Bridge, on Su causeway which bisects the lake, is the rebuilt tomb of Su Xiao Xiao, a 5th Century poet and courtesan whose life was the subject of many Tang dynasty poems. Xiao Xiao’s tomb was rebuilt recently after its destruction during the Cultural Revolution, an event which left a heavy mark on this city of monuments and religious icons.




Writing with water beside West Lake

 


Xiling Seal Engravers' Society

 West Lake remains a beauty spot beyond compare, not only for the lake itself but for the living culture continually going on around it. Near the Leifeng pavilion two elderly musicians were playing erhus when I walked by, another keeping time on a wooden clacker, while women took turns singing and joking with each other. Several people were writing poems on the walkway using pointed brushes dipped in water. Further on people were doing wushu and qigong exercises under the trees, walking with their families, or sitting on benches looking out at the Lake.

The Xiling Seal Engravers’ Society (西泠印社) still looks much as it did when I last stopped there: an attractive group of old buildings climbing up a steep hillside. Though seal-cutting is an ancient art, the Society itself is of recent vintage, founded in 1904 by seal artists from different schools, dedicated, says a sign, to research in “epigraphy and sphragistics.” Now, though, it’s mainly a place where seals are engraved and sold to tourists. I went there to get a birthday seal for Margaret.


View from Felai Feng

 On Saturday I took a bus out to the Wuling Mountains to see the Lingyin Temple and climb Felai Feng mountain, (飞来峰; literally "the peak that flew hither"), referring to the belief the mountain came from India bringing with it the sutras of Chan Buddhism. During the Cultural Revolution the Temple and figures in adjacent cave grottoes had been damaged. The Temple has been repaired but the headless stone figures remain, beside a sign saying in English, “It is a pity that the head parts had been damaged.”

Among the temples forming part of the Lingyin complex is the Lingshun temple, dedicated to Marshal Zhao Gong, god of wealth. This temple is said to be especially popular with local businessmen, and there was evidence; among the many offerings to the Marshal (so called because he has under him four lower gods in charge of property, treasure, rare collections, and the market – divine hedge fund managers) was a large stack of black briefcases.

Sunset over West Lake

Hangzhou from Baoshan

On Sunday I walked with a local friend up Bao Shan, a hill overlooking West Lake’s northwest end. It’s a favorite spot for people to hang out on a nice day, flirt, picnic, play the flute, bring singing birds in bamboo cages to hang from trees, or read inscriptions that have been cut into rocks over the centuries, some with remarks by Tang or Han Dynasty emperors on the beauty of the view or the coming of spring (though one emperor concluded his remarks on the natural setting by adding “there’s too much bamboo”).

Huang Binhong statue

On the way back to my hotel I stopped at the western-style home of Huang Binhong, a painter who died in 1955. Hangzhou is a town where painters and calligraphers are celebrated. Huang was famous for his dense, thick, modernistic style; he was among a new breed of literati fostered by China’s first republican revolution.

I was reminded of the importance of that first revolutionary period again at the statue near West Lake of Qiu Jin, a schoolteacher executed for leading an abortive uprising against the Manchu dynasty in 1907. Finally, I visited the Zhejiang provincial museum, not a large museum but with some of the most interesting pottery I’d seen, from the Three Kingdoms and Eastern Han dynasty periods.

I thought I’d end this blog with a picture of one of the most beguiling items in the museum: a Happy Family pot from the Eastern Han. From my happy family to yours, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Paula arrives in Wuhan today, and after visiting with friends she hasn’t seen in thirty years and looking around today’s go-go Wuhan, where she won’t recognize a thing, we’ll be taking the train to Guizhou, a province to the south known for beautiful scenery and a relative lack of economic development. My next blog will be from there.