Paradise blessed with immortal love stories
I did not set foot in Hangzhou until I was admitted to Hangzhou University, later merged into the much larger Zhejiang University. My neighbours joked that I would bump into a beautiful girl disguised as a young man en route. I was 15 and college kids were not supposed to date back then. For those in the know, the joke was a riff off the age-old legend of the Butterfly Lovers.
It’s a heartbreaking tale many Chinese proudly call China’s Romeo and Juliet, but it unfolds more like Yentl from the outset. Zhu Yingtai, from a wealthy family, wants a proper education at a time when women were denied the opportunity. So she dresses as a man. Over three years she develops this bromance with Liang Shanbo of a much humbler upbringing, who fails to see through the gender mask and views her only as his best buddy.
Long story short, their romance did not end well on Earth, but they are reunited in heaven — as a pair of butterflies. There are many places across China that claim to be the hometown of one of the lovebirds, but what’s indisputable is that the schooling part took place in Hangzhou.
The city plays host to another immortal love story that is even more wide-eyed fantasy:
Madam White Snake. With her maid Green Snake in tow, she descends from the mountains and spends a day mingling with mortals. She meets a young man from a local pharmacy and falls in love — the exact location is Broken Bridge on Bai Causeway. A word of explanation: the bridge was not really broken, but just appeared so from a certain angle at a certain lighting.
Though a snake demon, White Snake embodies benevolence, courage and style. She loves her husband and dispenses free medicine to those who cannot afford it. But she is unmasked and eventually imprisoned under Leifeng Pagoda.
When I first arrived in Hangzhou, the pagoda was long gone. (It crumbled in 1924, which was seen by some as a happy occasion that freed Madam White Snake; and was rebuilt in 2002.) The Broken Bridge was rebuilt in 1941, not half as romantic as it would have been. Still, I felt like I was stepping into a traditional brush painting of history, legends and fairy tales.
I cannot forget the first time I laid my eyes on the famed West Lake. The willow tree-lined banks, the shimmering water, the lotuses with pearly drops of water rolling on their leaves and the pagodas looming in the distance were all so evocative they snatched me out of the mundane world and gently nudged me into a realm of poetry and landscape scrolls.
Hangzhou is known for its scenic beauty. Here it’s not nature alone that’s awe-inspiring, but rather the seamless fusion of God’s creation and the human touch. Human civilisation in this area dates back 7,000 years. And epic tales of war and peace and treachery between the ancient kingdoms of Yue and Wu, roughly present-day Hangzhou and Suzhou, are still being dramatized on screen. Nowadays this whole area is considered “paradise on earth” and forms the core of the culturally significant “Jiangnan”, literally “south of the Yangtze River”.
Hangzhou was the largest city in the world during much of the southern Song Dynasty (960-1279). The Song empire was threatened by the Jurchens in the north and relocated its capital from Kaifeng to Hangzhou, then known as Lin’an. In 1275, a year before Mongols took power, it had a population of 1.75 million. Marco Polo referred to it as Kinsay and called it the City of Heaven. He was spot on when he describedlocalpeople as “fair and comely”, with “men of peaceful character” and “women extremely accomplished in all the arts of allurement”.
There are so many poems from that era that the city could be the most literarily blessed of all Chinese places. Take the two causeways on West Lake. Bai Causeway was named after Bai Juyi, the great Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907) poet, and Su Causeway after Su Shi (aka Su Dongpo), the great Song Dynasty poet. The two giants of Chinese literature were local governors who dredged the lake and built what look like ribbons around the priceless gift that is West Lake. Imagine Shakespeare not just managing the Globe Theatre but the whole of London and building landmarks like Tower Bridge and Kew Gardens.
West Lake has been imitated to a fault but never surpassed. Beijing’s Summer Palace and Old Summer Palace was intended to replicate its layout, and many Chinese cities have namesake pools of water as long as they are located on the western side of the town. But only in Hangzhou is the lake the heart and soul of the city. Poet Su called it “the eyes and eyebrows of the city”. Residents are intensely proud of it. I remember one winter morning as the city woke up to a night of dense and quiet snow. The whole town turned out voluntarily to remove the snow lest its burden denude the trees of their branches and twigs.
More than 30 years after I graduated, the city has become so much more enchanting. Polluting factories have been shut down; historical buildings have been lovingly restored; the lake water is now changed on a monthly basis by channeling the nearby Qiantang River; streets and boulevards have such dense leafy canopies that one gains the impression of walking or driving in a giant garden.
For my first visit to Hangzhou, in 1978, I had to take a seven-hour boat ride along the Grand Canal, a journey now shortened to half an hour on the expressway. When the canal was completed in 609, Hangzhou was still a small town with 1,500 households. Today when you emerge from the southern terminus of the river, you’ll find yourself in the midst of trendy highrises and gleaming bridges, a sight emperors of olden days could not envisage. However, the 1,400-year-old river is not at all dwarfed by the symbols of modernity. In Hangzhou, old and new, past and present, nature and mankind are somehow held in uncanny and perfect balance.