For more than a thousand years, Hangzhou has been China's dream landscape. Poets, emperors and painters have celebrated it as the most beautiful place in the country, and everything revolves around a single image: West Lake, the Xihu, a mirror of water surrounded by gentle hills, dotted with islands, pagodas, willows and humpback bridges that look straight out of an ink painting. Marco Polo, who visited in the 13th century when it was the largest and richest city in the world, described it in awe as 'the finest and most splendid city' he had ever seen.
Hangzhou is proof that beauty in China isn't always in the monumental, but sometimes in the serene: in the mist over the lake at dawn, in the scent of green tea in the Longjing hills, in the toll of a bell at the thousand-year-old Lingyin temple, in the reflection of a pagoda at sunset. It's a city for strolling slowly, drinking tea, drifting along in a boat and discovering why the Chinese consider it, together with neighbouring Suzhou, a piece of paradise on earth.
This guide covers the best of Hangzhou with a practical eye: how to go round West Lake without missing its corners, how to visit Lingyin temple and the Longjing tea fields, how to make the most of its closeness to Shanghai and Suzhou, and what you need to know about transport, prices and the VPN before you arrive. Hangzhou is modern and comfortable, but it keeps the poetic air that made it famous: one of the most peaceful and beautiful getaways of any trip through China.
Although the area was inhabited from ancient times, Hangzhou rose to prominence with the opening of the Grand Canal in the early 7th century, under the Sui dynasty, which made it the canal's southern terminus and a major trading centre. Its golden age came in the 12th century: when the Jurchen invaders conquered northern China, the Song dynasty took refuge in the south and set up its capital in Hangzhou (then called Lin'an), which became the most populous, richest and most refined city in the world, with more than a million inhabitants. It was in this period that West Lake, embellished with causeways and gardens by poet-officials such as Su Dongpo, achieved its legendary fame. Marco Polo visited under the Yuan dynasty and described it with wonder. Hangzhou suffered devastation in the Taiping Rebellion in the 19th century and then recovered; today it combines its poetic heritage with being one of China's tech capitals. The full story, from the Grand Canal to the Song capital and the city of Alibaba, is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓China's economic engine for a thousand years: the fertile Yangtze Delta, with the Hangzhou of the Song, the Suzhou of silk and gardens, and the Shanghai of the foreign concessions and skyscrapers.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Hangzhou's story begins, curiously enough, underwater. Much of what is now the city and its famous West Lake was, in the distant past, a coastal lagoon: a shallow bay open to the sea that silt from the Qiantang River slowly closed off until it became dry land and an inland lake. Remarkable Neolithic cultures lived in the surrounding hills, such as the Liangzhu culture, famous for its exquisitely fine jades, which flourished in the Yangtze delta more than five thousand years ago and is one of the cradles of Chinese civilisation.
For centuries, though, the area was a damp, marginal place in the shadow of other cities in the delta. The big leap came in the early 7th century under the Sui dynasty, with the completion of one of the greatest engineering works in human history: the Grand Canal, a network of navigable waterways linking the country's fertile south, around the Yangtze, with the northern plain and the imperial capital. Hangzhou was chosen as the southern end of this great river axis.
That decision changed its fate. From a settlement carved out of the marshes, Hangzhou became the starting point of China's most important trade route, the place where rice, silk and the wealth of the south set off on their journey north. The city grew with the canal traffic and began to gather people and riches. Under the Tang dynasty it was already a thriving trading city, and its governors began to tame and beautify West Lake with dikes and causeways, laying the foundations of the landscape that would make it legendary.
If Hangzhou is now a byword for beauty, it owes much of that to a handful of poets who also served as the city's governors. West Lake is not a purely natural landscape but a work of art cultivated over centuries, and two names shine above all others in that transformation. The first is Bai Juyi, one of the great poets of the Tang dynasty, who was governor of Hangzhou in the 9th century and had the lake's dikes reinforced to regulate the water and protect the fields; the Bai Causeway is named after him today, and his verses about the lake are still recited.
The second, and the most revered, is Su Dongpo (Su Shi), an 11th-century poet, painter, calligrapher and official, and one of the best-loved figures in all of Chinese culture. Sent to govern Hangzhou, he found the lake half choked with mud and weeds and organised a major dredging project; with the mud he had a long, tree-lined causeway built across the lake from north to south, the famous Su Causeway, one of the loveliest and most photographed spots there. Su Dongpo compared the beauty of the lake to that of a legendary lady, and that image became forever etched in the Chinese imagination.
And so, between poems and public works, Hangzhou built its reputation as a paradise. In the 10th century, the city had also been the capital of the small, refined kingdom of Wuyue during the Five Dynasties period, which endowed it with temples and pagodas such as the Six Harmonies Pagoda. By the time the Song dynasty reunified China, Hangzhou was already one of the most cultured and prosperous cities in the country, with its lake as its emblem. Its golden age was just around the corner.
Hangzhou's moment of greatest glory came on the back of a catastrophe. In 1127, the Jurchens of the Jin dynasty, a people from the north, invaded China and captured the Song imperial capital in the north, along with the emperor. What was left of the court fled south and, after several years on the run, set up a new capital in Hangzhou, which they renamed Lin'an ('temporary peace', a name that betrayed the hope of one day recovering the lost north). So was born the Southern Song dynasty, which would rule from Hangzhou for a century and a half.
Far from being a sad exile, that period turned Lin'an into the largest, richest and most sophisticated city in the world of its day. With the north lost, all the empire's energy was concentrated in the prosperous south, and Hangzhou grew to more than a million inhabitants at a time when no European city reached a hundred thousand. It was a hive of trade, crafts, printing, porcelain and silk, with streets full of shops, restaurants, theatres and teahouses, an urban standard of living that astonished visitors. Southern Song culture reached highly refined peaks in landscape painting, poetry, ceramics and Neo-Confucian philosophy.
It was to this dazzling Hangzhou that, by his own account, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo arrived shortly afterwards, by then under Mongol rule, describing it as 'the finest and most splendid city in the world', with its countless bridges, its markets and its lake. The Southern Song dynasty fell in 1276 to the Mongols of Kublai Khan, who absorbed Hangzhou into their Yuan empire; the city lost its status as capital but kept its fame and commercial prosperity as one of China's great ports and silk centres.
Under the Ming and Qing dynasties, Hangzhou remained one of the most prosperous and cultured cities in southern China, famous for its silk, its Longjing tea (which became a tribute tea for the emperors) and the beauty of its lake, which drew travellers, poets and the emperors themselves. The Qing emperor Qianlong visited Hangzhou several times in the 18th century and was so taken with West Lake that he had its scenery copied in the imperial gardens of Beijing; according to tradition, he personally planted the famous 'eighteen imperial bushes' of Longjing tea.
Tragedy struck in the mid-19th century with the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), one of the bloodiest wars in human history, which pitted the Qing empire against a huge millenarian movement rooted in an unorthodox form of Christianity. Southern China, the heart of the rebellion, was devastated, and Hangzhou suffered especially badly: the city was besieged and taken several times, and it is estimated that a huge share of its population died in those years from fighting, famine and epidemics. Temples, palaces and entire neighbourhoods were razed. It was perhaps the hardest blow in its entire history.
Hangzhou took decades to recover from that catastrophe. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries it slowly rebuilt itself, restoring temples and pagodas and reviving its silk and tea industries. The arrival of the railway connected it with Shanghai, which was growing nearby as a major port, and Hangzhou also began to turn towards tourism, attracting visitors who came, as always, to gaze at West Lake.
Throughout the 20th century, Hangzhou went through the ups and downs of Chinese history: the fall of the empire, the Republic, the Japanese occupation during the Second Sino-Japanese War and, from 1949, the People's Republic. Under the new regime, the city kept its role as a tourist destination and retreat: Mao Zedong was particularly fond of Hangzhou and visited it dozens of times, drafting some important documents of his era here, beside West Lake. Temples and gardens were restored, and the lake was preserved as one of the country's great landscapes.
The big change came with the economic reforms of recent decades. Well placed in the booming Yangtze delta and a stone's throw from Shanghai, Hangzhou became one of the most dynamic and wealthy cities in China. Its most striking transformation has been technological: this is where Alibaba, the e-commerce giant founded by Jack Ma, was born and has its headquarters, and around it a whole ecosystem of digital and mobile payment companies has flourished (the ubiquitous Alipay was created here), making Hangzhou one of the capitals of China's new economy. The city gained international profile by hosting the G20 summit in 2016 and the Asian Games in 2023.
Today Hangzhou strikes a difficult balance: it is a modern metropolis of more than ten million people, with skyscrapers, a metro and tech headquarters, yet it keeps West Lake as a poetic haven at its heart, protected, free to visit and listed as a World Heritage Site. The same landscapes that Bai Juyi and Su Dongpo sang about more than a thousand years ago are still there, wrapped in mist at dawn, a reminder of why the Chinese have said for centuries that Hangzhou, together with Suzhou, is a piece of paradise on earth.
