Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
西湖 · Xīhú
A silting lagoon that a thousand years of dredging, causeways and poems turned into a picture. World Heritage since 2011.
Photo: Wanderingchina, CC BY 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
West Lake was not born beautiful. It is a lagoon that would have silted up and become rice fields if people had left it alone.
Two of China's best-loved poets, Bai Juyi in the Tang (618–907) and Su Shi in the Song (960–1279), each governed Hangzhou and each had the lake dug out. The Broken Bridge in front of you is where the Bai Causeway begins. It is also the bridge of the White Snake story.
West Lake is not a park with a gate. The water and its shores are free and open at all hours. What you pay for are a few separate places on and around the lake, each with its own ticket, so it helps to know before you come what there is to see and which parts cost extra.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Bai Causeway and the Broken Bridge | Free |
| Solitary Hill | Free |
| Yue Fei's temple and tomb | Own ticket, from 25 yuan |
| The Su Causeway | Free |
| Three Pools Mirroring the Moon (the island) | Reached only by boat. The boat ticket includes landing |
| Leifeng Pagoda | Own ticket, 40 yuan |
| Lingyin Temple and Feilai Feng | Free since December 2025, but you must book |
From here you can read the skeleton of the lake. Behind you to the north, the thin Baochu Pagoda stands on Gem Hill. Across the water to the south is the stout Leifeng Pagoda. An old saying compares them: Leifeng like an old monk, Baochu like a beauty.
Under your feet the Bai Causeway runs about a kilometre to Solitary Hill. Out in the lake are three small islands. Far to the west, the Su Causeway crosses the whole lake from south to north, 2.8 km long.
The water covers about 6.4 square kilometres and a walk round it is close to 15 km. Hills close it in on three sides and the city lies on the fourth, to the east.
"Lingering Snow on the Broken Bridge" is one of the Ten Scenes named in the Southern Song (1127–1279). The bridge is not broken. After snow, the sunny crown of the arch melts first, and from a distance the white bridge seems to have a gap in it.
UNESCO lists it as a cultural landscape, not a natural site, because most of what you see was made: the causeways, islands, pagodas and the names given to the views.
The lake's makers were officials who wrote poetry, and people have been coming to stand on its causeways ever since. Imagine some of them beside you.
Its old name was the White Sand Causeway and it already existed in the Tang. Bai Juyi did build a dyke while he governed the city, but it stood outside the Qiantang Gate and can no longer be found. Later generations ran the two together, and the White Sand Causeway became the "Bai Causeway".
The name "West Lake" is first found in Bai Juyi's poems. Its first use in an official document is in Su Shi's petition asking to dredge it.
Lin Bu's couplet on plum blossom, with its sparse shadows across clear shallow water and a faint scent drifting at dusk, is the most famous ever written on the flower. The hill also holds the Zhejiang Provincial Museum's lakeside branch and the Xiling Seal Art Society.
Yue Fei, the Song general who fought the Jin, was put to death at the end of the year that falls in January 1142. The next emperor cleared his name and reburied him here below Qixia Ridge. The temple was founded in 1221. Its halls have been rebuilt many times on the same spot, and in 1979 two Southern Song stone figures were found underground beside the tomb path, which confirms the burial place.
In front of the tomb four iron figures kneel with their hands tied behind them: the minister Qin Hui, his wife Lady Wang, and the officials Moqi Xie and Zhang Jun. The earliest that can be dated were three cast in bronze in 1513. Visitors have beaten them so hard for so long that they have been recast many times.
A question to talk over: the order to kill Yue Fei came from the emperor. Why are only the ministers kneeling here?
Why did the lake have to be dug? Hangzhou stands on former tidal flats and its groundwater was salty and bitter. The city drank from the lake. Su Shi wrote that Hangzhou without West Lake would be like a face without eyes and eyebrows.
The causeway has six bridges, from south to north: Yingbo, Suolan, Wangshan, Yadi, Dongpu and Kuahong. Each is a single half-round stone arch, so that small boats can pass through the causeway.
The three stone pagodas began as boundary markers. After the dredging Su Shi had small stone towers set in the water, and inside the line they marked no one was allowed to plant water chestnuts and take over the lake. His towers stood somewhere else. Today's three are later rebuildings, bottle-shaped and about two metres high.
Each is hollow, with five round holes evenly spaced in its ball-shaped body. On the night of the Mid-Autumn Festival candles are lit inside and thin paper is pasted over the holes, and the water fills with small moons.
The island beside them, Xiaoyingzhou, is the largest of the three and from above looks like the character 田: an island in a lake with a lake in the island. The back of the one-yuan note of the fifth series of the renminbi shows this spot. From that angle only two towers can be seen.
In 977 Qian Chu, last king of the state of Wuyue (907–978), built a pagoda here to hold a relic of the Buddha's hair. A year later he handed his kingdom to the Song without a fight, and Hangzhou was spared a war.
On the afternoon of 25 September 1924 the pagoda collapsed. One major cause was that people had been pulling out its bricks. Folk belief held that a brick kept evil away, brought sons and helped silkworms. Some bricks held printed sutras, and "sutra bricks" was misheard as "gold bricks".
On 11 March 2001 the crypt was opened, with eighteen hours of live television. Inside an iron case stood a gilt-silver reliquary in the form of an Ashoka stupa, now the chief treasure of the Zhejiang Provincial Museum. The new pagoda, finished on 25 October 2002, is built over the old base. On the ground floor you can see the Wuyue foundations and broken bricks.
Lingyin is the oldest great temple in Hangzhou, founded in the Eastern Jin (317–420), usually said to be in 326. The Buddha in its main hall is carved from 24 blocks of camphor wood and stands 24.8 metres high.
The cliffs and caves of the hill opposite, Feilai Feng, carry Buddhist carvings from the Five Dynasties (907–960) to the Yuan (1271–1368). The best known is a Southern Song laughing Maitreya with a great belly, surrounded by eighteen arhats.
The full story of the White Snake is first found in Feng Menglong's Ming (1368–1644) collection Stories to Caution the World, and may go back to a Song storyteller's tale. The lake is its stage: the Broken Bridge and Leifeng Pagoda are both in it.
When the pagoda fell in 1924 the writer Lu Xun published an essay within weeks, glad for the snake. In 1958 the story became The White Snake Enchantress, Toei's first feature and Japan's first colour animated feature.
The 1992 Taiwanese television series New Legend of Madame White Snake, with Angie Chiu and Cecilia Yip, has been rerun in mainland China ever since 1993. Tsui Hark's film Green Snake (1993) retells it from the maid's side, and the animated White Snake (2019) gives it a prequel.
Su Shi compared the lake to Xi Shi, the great beauty of antiquity, lovely in light make-up or heavy. That poem is why it is also called Xizi Lake. Bai Juyi, years after leaving, wrote that of all the south he remembered Hangzhou most. The 2016 G20 show took its title from that line.
The Butterfly Lovers violin concerto (1959), by He Zhanhao and Chen Gang, is built on a legend set at Wansong Academy, on the hill south-east of the lake.
The mad monk Ji Gong of novels and of the 1985 television series grew out of stories about the Southern Song monk Daoji. Lingyin Temple has a hall for him.
West Lake's habit of naming ten views was copied across East Asia. Kunming Lake at the Summer Palace in Beijing, with its West Dyke and six bridges, was laid out by the Qianlong Emperor after this lake and the Su Causeway. Su Shi himself left another West Lake with another Su Causeway at Huizhou in the far south.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 326 | Lingyin Temple is founded, by the traditional date | Constantine is planning his new capital, Constantinople |
| 822–824 | Bai Juyi governs Hangzhou | Scholars in Baghdad are translating Greek science |
| 977 | Leifeng Pagoda is built | The Song dynasty is 17 years old |
| 1090 | Su Shi builds his causeway | Bologna's university dates from 1088; the First Crusade sets out in 1096 |
| 1142 | Yue Fei is put to death | At Saint-Denis near Paris the first Gothic choir is nearly finished |
| 1221 | Yue Fei's temple is founded | Magna Carta is six years old; Genghis Khan is campaigning in Central Asia |
| 1924 | Leifeng Pagoda falls | Lu Xun writes his essay on the fall the same year |
One line to remember: when Su Shi was piling up his causeway, Europe had just got its first university.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The Indian monk Huili is said to have arrived here, declared that the hill was a small peak of Vulture Peak in India that had somehow flown to Hangzhou, and built Lingyin Temple below it. The hill's name means “the peak that flew here”.
Source: Temple tradition
A white snake spirit takes human form, meets a young man at the Broken Bridge and marries him. In the end a monk shuts her under Leifeng Pagoda.
Source: Feng Menglong, Stories to Caution the World, 1624
Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai are said to have shared a classroom for three years at Wansong Academy. Several other towns, among them Ningbo, Yixing and Runan, claim the story too.
Source: Local folk tale
The monk Daoji is said to have been ordained at Lingyin Temple before he became the Ji Gong of the stories.
Source: Local folk tale
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-11. Travel and news reports, not the site's own notices.
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