Hangzhou

I went to the city of Hangzhou a couple of weeks ago on a business trip.

Hangzhou is a city about 100 miles to the Southwest of Suzhou.  With Shanghai to the South East, it forms a triangle of tourism in the Yangtze river delta.  Suzhou is about 2 hours from Shanghai.  Hangzhou is about 2 hours form Suzhou.  Shanghai is about two hours from Hanghzou. 

There is an old Chinese saying that "Heaven is above and Suzhou and Hangzhou are just below".  Or so I am told by the boards of tourism for Suzhou and Hangzhou.  These are the two most historic cities in East-South-Central China.  They both date back thousands of years.  They are both major ports-of-call on the Grand Canal from Beijing.  Shanghai, in the grand scheme of things, is a relatively new upstart.  Suzhou and Hangzhou take the historical cheese.

Though, truth be told, in relation to Hangzhou, I think that Suzhou has an inferiority complex. Suzhou is like the younger brother that achieves great things, but never quite measures up to the older sibling.  Suzhou could claim to be a major city on the Grand Canal, but Hangzhou was the terminus - once a traveller from Beijing arrived there it was pointless to go further.  Suzhou was a seat of provincial government but Hangzou was, for a time, the capital of all China.  In the 12th and 13th centuries Suzhou was going great guns, but at the same time Hangzhou doing even better - and was arguably the largest city in the world for a while.

Marco Polo visited both Suzhou and Hangzhou during his travels to China.  He thought that "Soochow is a very great and noble city".  But then again he thought that Hangzhou was  "beyond dispute the finest and noblest in the world."

The city of Hangzhou is built around the West Lake, or XiHu.  The elegant parts of Suzhou tend to be hidden away behind walls and only to be seen after paying price of admission.  Hangzhou has the advantage that its jewels are built on and around the lake.  Anyone can walk around the lake.   The sights are open for view by even the poorest of travellers. 

For me, though, Hangzhou was a working trip and it was nearly dark when we went walking around the West Lake.  So I saw little of Hangzhou's famed beauty and, in the waning light, could photograph even less.

The photo at top shows the famous "lingering snow on broken bridge".  The bridge is way in the background...behind the acres of lotus flowers that were blooming on the lake.  It's not that the bridge is broken...but that after a snowfall it appears to be broken in it's center.   Or maybe not.  Maybe it's one of the other legends regarding how the bridge was named.   So it goes with China....there is so much history that two or three legends contend for the history of every landmark.