West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou
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How it came to be
Hangzhou's West Lake began as a lagoon cut off from the sea about 2,000 years ago, which silt slowly turned to swamp. Under the Eastern Han the official Hua Xin had a seawall built between lake and sea. From the Tang dynasty poets, scholars and painters praised its beauty.
In 822 the poet Bai Juyi, then governor of Hangzhou, dredged the lake and built a causeway from the mud, today's Bai Causeway, and in 1089 Su Shi, or Su Dongpo, did the same with the Su Causeway. Repeated dredging between the 9th and 12th centuries created three artificial islands and two causeways. From the Southern Song dynasty, ten scenes with poetic names have been singled out.
The Leifeng Pagoda, built in 975, collapsed in 1924 and was rebuilt in 2002. Seen as an ideal union of people and nature, the West Lake landscape shaped garden design not only in China but also in Japan and Korea. It was inscribed in 2011.
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