Hangzhou’s West Lake was engineered out of a bay
West Lake covers only 6.39 square kilometres west of Hangzhou’s old walls, yet Tang and Song poets made it a national template for beauty. Dredging kept a former shallow bay from becoming swamp; causeways and islands turned hydrology into literature.
Also called Xihu or, historically, Qiantang Lake, this freshwater lake is ringed by gentle hills on three sides. Tourists have come since the Tang dynasty (618–907); by Song times (960–1279) its relics and vistas were already canonical. The Book of Han, finished in 111, mentions Wulin waters that later readers take as the lake’s first written hint near today’s Lingyin hills.
Bai Juyi was among the first to call it West Lake, for its position west of the city, and 16th-century scholars ranked it the most famous of some three dozen Chinese lakes sharing that name. Geologically, falling seas some 4,400 to 2,500 years ago left a shallow bay on the Hangzhou–Jiaxing–Huzhou plain until the Qiantang River’s sand sealed it into a lake. By about 2,000 years ago it had become a lagoon, freshened by mountain streams but steadily silting toward swamp, and only repeated dredging kept it open. In the Jianzhong years of 780 to 783 the official Li Bi piped its water under the city into six ponds, and in 822 Bai Juyi dredged the lake and heaped the silt into a causeway that bears his name. Su Shi's 1090 petition to the court asking for more dredging was the first official use of the name.
The lake stretches 3.2 km north to south and 2.8 km east to west, with four causeways, three man-made islands and one natural island, Gushan, and the Leifeng and Baochu pagodas facing each other across the water. Buddhist rulers of the Wuyue kingdom built or enlarged Lingyin and other temples and pagodas around its shores, and from the 12th century visiting Japanese monks carried images of the lake across East Asia. When the Song court moved to Hangzhou in 1129, the lake became a retreat for city dwellers, and sightseeing for pleasure, with set routes and viewing orders, grew into a business.
Under the Mongols the lake was renamed the Pond of Freeing Captive Animals, and in 1309 Hangzhou logged more than 1,200 foreign visitors in six months; Marco Polo introduced it to Europe. It later appeared on a 1979 one-yuan note. Since 2002 a dedicated committee has run the scenic area, the first major Chinese attraction to drop its entrance fee, and over the 2024 National Day holiday it drew 4.426 million visitors in a week.
Source: West Lake
