Adventures in Hangzhou (Because we can’t go anywhere else)

So Katy already wrote about our trip to a tea plantation this weekend, so I thought it is long over due that I write about our two other trips around the city. Primarily to the home of a a long dead but quite eccentric Qing era merchant who built a rather elaborate and impressive home in the center of old Hangzhou. Perhaps more impressive is the fact that it’s survived all of the changes Hangzhou has faced in the 150 years since it’s construction. The home features a garden which includes an artificial mountain and cave network! Speaking of people trying to artificially replicate nature we also visited the artificial island sitting in the middle of West Lake known as 3 Pools Reflecting the Moon. It’s an island in the middle of a lake with a lake in the middle of it!

As Katy may have mentioned before we currently can not leave the city limits on pain of not being able to go to work for 14 days. With any luck they’ll change that soon, but for now we’ll have to keep ourselves entertained by all that Hangzhou has to offer within the city limits. Well…what it has to offer which has so far reopened.

So to get into this place we had to produce our green QR code and also fill out a rather convoluted app. In the attend the local staff got so fed up with trying to communicate with us in Chinese that they kind of just waved us in. Right now there is this rather strange thing in Hangzhou wherein’ some tourism sites require foreigners to sign in with their passport details. This is continuing to confuse and befuddle me, particularly as Foreigner’s like myself can’t even enter the country anymore and haven’t been able to do so for going on 17 days. So even the last of the last to make it in will have completed their two weeks quarantine. Then again the way Chinese people are treating the pandemic at this point is rather broad in spectrum. Some are wearing masks and living in terror of public transport should there be asymptomatic people…who are some how not creating new cases that are not asymptomatic. Whilst others are not really wearing masks, or like my own Chinese friends, completely ignoring even normal levels of hygiene. (I guess sharing food in the center is a traditional element of Chinese dining, I’m on board with it, but plunging chop sticks which have just been in your mouth into the same food other people are doing the same as…I don’t know that’s pushing it a bit, and that’s from a guy who regularly engages in 5 second rule.)

So anywho! We visited the house of the wealthy merchant. It was pretty cool. Of course this does sit neatly on the long long loooooong list of tourist attractions made for Chinese people for Chinese people (Other than the biggest attractions IE: The Wall, there is rarely more than a faint attempt at putting things up in English or accommodating non-Mandarin speakers) which is fine, it is China after all. They have more than enough domestic tourists to treat the rest of the non-Mandarin speaking world as an after thought. So this site, like many is really enjoyable for visual spectacle than actually being informative/historically enlightening. Luckily I’m familiar with the era and the man that built this house so some dots could be connected.

When this place was built Hangzhou was a good 2 or 3 centuries past it’s glory days. During the 10th to 14th centuries Hangzhou was one of the most populated and wealthiest cities on the planet. Far enough from the ongoing raids and wars of the north, close enough to the ocean and located at the terminus of the Grand Canal (A system of rivers which go all the way up to Beijing) Hangzhou was able to capitalize on trade. Throw in the fact that Hangzhou was home to some of the best tea plantations and silk manufacturers in the world at the time, it made Hangzhou the locus for a lot of what was the Chinese economic power house (Of the 8th – 17th centuries specifically) of the…well world. Still though Hangzhou’s days of glory were well past it by the mid 19th century Hu Xueyan managed to become very wealthy as he held a controlling stake of Hangzhou’s biggest shopping street.

I really wish I had taken more pictures here come to think of it. Most notable were two false mountain peaks in the style of nearby Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) and a small cave network. Even the steps leading up to the second floor and his tea-house have been sculpted to resemble a pathway carved up the side of a mountain!

The following week we visited Three Pools Reflecting the Moon.

Constructed by a variety of different poets/government officials over several centuries. It’s actually sculpted in the shape of the Chinese character Shi (ten). It’s covered in little temples and rather stagnant water. In the past it was the site of a Buddhist monastery and temple where people would release captured fish/birds as a form of ritual sacrifice (Well without the death of an animal atleast). Supposedly it gets its name from the fact that the stillness of the enclosed lake (Within a lake) reflects the moon beautifully at night. To be honest I am a bit skeptical of this, I don’t think I’ve seen the moon once since I moved to Hangzhou between all of the overcast and light of the city. Still I imagine even 50 years ago it could live up to it’s name sake!

Indeed it was quite a popular destination amongst the locals. Whom are I assume mostly locals as travel between provinces is still rather restrictive/complicated at the moment.

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It’s a rather peaceful place and does give you a really good panoramic view of the lake and all of the city/mountains that surround it.

Oh one other place we visited was the tomb of Yue Fei. Yue Fei is quite famous within China (And especially Hangzhou) as a great general who defended the ailing Song Dynasty from marauding hordes, protecting China time and time again…until the Emperor decided he didn’t like him and had him murdered. A few decades later the Emperors successor thought it best to dig up his remains and re-bury him in a proper monument/temple complex.

The complex is relaxing and rather nice and considerably less elaborate than the Vietnamese tombs we visited in Vietnam (I should probably make a post about that sometime) However it interestingly has a lot of the same features, such as this honor guard of statues.

Perhaps most interesting/unique is the inclusion of a few statues of the supposed traitors who got Yue Fei killed in the first place. Cast in iron (And occaisonally refurbished over the past 800 years. They kneel dejectedly towards the burial mound of the hero they wrong.

So that’s pretty much what we’ve been getting up to around Hangzhou over the past few weeks since we got out of quarantine! Hurray! Now to do more Chinese lessons.