Solitary Hill (Gushan)

The story

You are on a shady road along the foot of a low hill, with water on your left and old walls, gateways and stone steps on your right going up among camphor trees. A restaurant with red pillars faces the lake. Further on, a moon-shaped gate opens onto a garden of rocks climbing the slope.

In the 1020s a poet named Lin Bu lived here alone for twenty years, refusing every invitation to court. He planted plum trees and kept cranes, and people said the plums were his wife and the cranes his children. At the same time in England, King Cnut ruled an empire round the North Sea.

Part of West Lake, Hangzhou. Also there: Bai Causeway, Yue Fei's Temple, Su Causeway, Three Pools Mirroring the Moon, Leifeng Pagoda, Lingyin Temple.

What is here

The hill, the museum branch, the seal society garden and the graves are all free.

If you have one minute

At the foot of the hill

Solitary Hill is the only natural island in West Lake; the others were piled up from dredged mud. It is solitary only in name: the Bai Causeway joins it to the east shore and the short Xiling Bridge to the north.

Emperors liked it. The Kangxi and Qianlong emperors stayed in a travelling palace on its south side, and Qianlong had a library built here to hold one of the seven copies of the largest book ever made in China.

Today the hill is a park, free, with a museum, a library and a seal carvers' garden that are also free.

Things people often get wrong

"It is an island you need a boat to reach." You walk onto it from either causeway.

"The plum trees are Lin Bu's." The trees you see were planted in the last hundred years. His grave is real; it was dug open after the fall of the Song (960–1279) and later rebuilt.

"The seal society is a museum." It is a working society of artists, founded in 1904, that still elects its members. The garden is open to all.

People who stood here

• Lin Bu (Song poet and hermit, 967–1028)He lived on this hill for twenty years without once going into the city. His two lines on plum blossom, its sparse shadows lying across clear shallow water and its faint scent drifting at dusk, are the most famous ever written on the flower.
• Wu Changshuo (painter and seal carver, 1844–1927)In 1913 he became the first president of the seal society on this hill. A bronze statue of him sits in the garden, and his seals are still copied by students across East Asia.
• Qiu Jin (revolutionary and poet, 1875–1907)She was beheaded in Shaoxing in 1907 for plotting against the Qing (1644–1912). Her friends buried her by the lake, as she had asked, and the grave was moved and restored more than once. Her white statue stands at the foot of Xiling Bridge.

Go deeper: five stops round the hill

A path goes right round the hill in about forty minutes; another climbs over the top. These stops go round anticlockwise from the end of the Bai Causeway.

1. The museum and the library

The Zhejiang Provincial Museum began here in 1929. Its lakeside branch, in buildings round the old imperial palace grounds, shows painting, calligraphy, porcelain and lacquer, and is free.

Behind it is Wenlan Pavilion, finished in the 1780s to house the Complete Library of the Four Treasuries, an imperial copy of more than 36,000 volumes. Much of it was lost when the city was taken in 1861, during the Taiping war. Local scholars spent decades copying the missing parts back. The books are now kept in the provincial library; the pavilion and its rock garden can be visited.

2. The seal carvers' garden

In 1904 four seal carvers met here and founded a society "to protect metal and stone, and to study seal carving". Its garden climbs the hill in terraces, with a small stone pagoda, rock-cut inscriptions and pools. It is the oldest society of its kind in China.

At the top you can see over the whole north of the lake.

3. The hermit's grave

On the north side, facing the inner lake, is Lin Bu's grave and the Crane-releasing Pavilion. Inside the pavilion is a stone tablet carved with an old text about cranes, copied in the Kangxi Emperor's hand. In late winter the slope below is covered in plum blossom.

4. The bridge and two graves

At the west end of the hill a short stone bridge, Xiling Bridge, crosses to the north shore. Beside it, under a small pavilion, is the grave of Su Xiaoxiao, a singing girl of the fifth century famous in poems. The present grave was rebuilt in 2004.

Across the bridge, at its far end, stands the white statue of Qiu Jin over her tomb.

5. The restaurant

On the south shore, facing the lake, is Louwailou, a restaurant founded in 1848. Its name comes from a Song poem about the lake: "beyond the hills more hills, beyond the towers more towers". It is famous for West Lake fish in vinegar sauce.