10 ways to experience Hangzhou, China

Sitting on the tranquil West Lake, Hangzhou is China's imperial city of poetry, also home to avant-garde art and web giants. Here's how to get the best out Marco Polo's favourite Chinese metropolis

Hangzhou is China’s city of poetry. Chinese school children still read odes to the willow-fringed West Lake, and many of Hangzhou’s imperial governors were revered poets, with both Su Dongpo and Bai Juyi building causeways across the lake to better contemplate the waters that Bai compared to ‘the sash of a blue damask skirt’. Marco Polo concurred with the old proverb that Hangzhou was Earth’s answer to Heaven, declaring it ‘without a doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world’.

Now just 40 minutes by bullet train from the skyscraping intensity of Shanghai, the gardens and pagoda-specked hills around the West Lake are barely changed from what the Venetian explorer came across in the late 13th century. Visitors still cross the lake in sampan wooden boats and eat quivering Dongpo braised pork belly with Longjing green tea under the pagoda eaves, the lapping of the lake echoed by the tranquil notes of the guqin.

But although Hangzhou remains one of the most evocative cities in the Middle Kingdom, with its Buddhist temples in the forest, it is much more than an imperial reverie. China’s answer to Silicon Valley is the birthplace of gaming giants NetEase and e-commerce pioneers Alibaba, whose Dream Town hub is already home to hundreds of tech start-ups. The calligraphers of Hangzhou lore have been joined by fresh-thinking digital artists such as the painter-animator Wu Junyong and video artist Zhang Peili, who has shown at New York’s Guggenheim and MoMA museums. The city’s new breed of fashionistas include Kate Han, of fashion brand Muzkin, whose irreverent riffs on imperial motifs and Tiger Balm logos have wound up on London catwalks and in Gigi Hadid’s wardrobe.

This is the thrilling mish-mash of modern Hangzhou, where locals travel across Bai’s Causeway on China’s first bike-share scheme; where millennial-pink cafés are serving WeChat-ordered flat whites in ancient lǐlòng laneways; and the famous stone carvings of the Lingyin Temple have been joined by modern monuments including Henning Larsen’s iceberg-like Hangzhou Yuhang Opera House. Another old proverb has it that the past remembered is a good guide for the future. Hangzhou is living that truth, and gliding forwards like a sampan on the shimmering water.

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Glide along the West Lake
Bike or boat are the best ways to see the West Lake’s beauty spots, 10 of which have their own epithets – including Three Pools Mirroring the Moon, a little island where visitors sometimes stop with picnics. Many hotels have bikes for hire, and the city is home to China’s original and most successful bike-share scheme. You can rent sampan boats all around the lake, driven by boatmen who will take you around the lake and under ornate bridges, with just the sound of their single oar tapping on the gentle waters. For a classic view across the lake, hike up Wushan hill to the Chenghuang Pavilion, its large red vision emerging through the trees.
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Go traditional
The Four Seasons Hangzhou is set in a complex of imperial-inspired Jiang Nan pagodas and Chinese gardens right on the West Lake, and guests are encouraged to arrive on a rustic wooden boat, with a pot of Longjing tea onboard. Up in the bamboo-filled hills just out of town, Amanfayun is the result of late architect Jaya Ibrahim’s sensitive conversion of an entire Tang-dynasty tea-farming village. The 51 stone courtyard dwellings have an elegantly monastic vibe, and orange-clad monks from the seven surrounding temples (including Lingyin Temple) often glide along the dappled pathways, adding to the serenity of the place. The Banyan Tree Hangzhou has a similarly magical setting: a water village of arched bridges and wing-tipped pagodas inside the Xixi Wetlands Nature Reserve, with lily ponds and soaring egrets.
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Or modern
The 49-storey Park Hyatt Hangzhou is lofty and sleek-lined, with a Lost In Translation feel and views across the city towards the Longjing tea plantations from the black granite infinity pool. Li Xiang, the female Shanghai designer who has become a darling of blogs and Chinese social media, is behind three daring hotel projects in the city – including the surreal Park Zoo Hotel, with its Memphis-meets-zebra stripes and bright elephant and walrus sculptures.
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Try Longjing tea
Longjing green tea is Hangzhou’s most famous product – prized for its light, sweet, mellow aroma (and suitably expensive), and long associated with Chan Buddhist meditation rituals. In Longjing village, amid the tea plantations of the city’s southwest, traditional tea farmers peddle their wares along the roadside, with some families pouring cups of the green elixir before you buy. But for something more refined, China has recently rediscovered the art of the tea ceremony, and it’s easy to find them across the city – including at Longjing village’s China National Tea Museum, and among the pagodas and lily ponds of Guo’s Villa, a traditional Chinese garden set apart from the bustle around the West Lake. There’s also the He Cha Guan tea house in the grounds of the Amanfayun, owned by a respected lecturer who’ll serve the best Longjing tea, as well as wonderful set meals sourced fresh from the market that day.
Dive into the art scene
Hangzhou has always drawn artists, from imperial calligraphers and ink artists to Lin Fengmian, a 20th-century giant of Chinese art, who fused Eastern and Western styles, right up to modern digital artists such as Zhang Peili. Second only to Beijing as an arts centre, Hangzhou is home to the China Academy of Art with a folk-art museum that’s worth a visit just to see Kengo Kuma’s terraced modern space. The Zhejiang Art Museum gives an overview of the city’s art history, but there’s more of a contemporary buzz at the white-box Sanshang Art gallery.

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Destination dining
Zhejiang, or Zhe, cuisine is one of the Eight Culinary Traditions of Chinese food – and Hangzhou’s Hangbang cooking is a big part of that. As opposed to the spiciness and richness of much regional Chinese food, dishes in Hangzhou are known for their freshness and mellow flavours, as in fried shrimp with Longjing tea or beggar’s chicken wrapped in lotus and mud and roasted on an open fire. There are a number of famous restaurants here that are known as much for their ink-painting settings as their food. Take the serene Longjing Manor, in a lush, osmanthus-filled garden in the tea-growing area. The cook and Chinese food specialist Fuchsia Dunlop is among the many who have praised chef Dai Jianjun’s 10-course farm-to-table menus which include free-range, slow-cooked Dongpo pork, a quivering cube of deep-red meat named after Song governor-poet-gastronome Su Dongpo. The original Green Tea restaurant is a series of rustic wood structures sitting on a tributary of the West Lake with an imperial log-cabin vibe and queues so inevitable for the barbecue pork and spicy West Lake fish that it opened another branch in town, and one in Beijing.
Eat the streets
For a street-food hit in the evenings, an orange-glowing section of Zhongshan Nan Lu (South Street) near the old Drum Tower has been given over to xiaochi (small bites) stalls, selling everything from fresh river shrimp to beggar’s chicken and pian er chuan pork-and-bamboo noodles, eaten on plastic tables with Tsingtao beer from large dispensers. Another cool place to seek out is Dadou Lu Food Street, a lantern-lit collection of ancient riverside buildings reached by water bus, mostly filled with home-style restaurants such as Jiang Nan Yi, where there are often queues for chef Tuzi’s flower pepper chicken and short ribs in pickled tofu sauce.
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Temple hopping
Hangzhou is dotted with temples, but to really get a sense of its long connection with Chan Buddhism, it’s best to head into the Wulin Mountains within the city. A series of temples, grottos and rock carvings are scattered among the trees, mostly famously the Lingyin Temple, founded by an Indian monk in the third century AD, and next to Felai Feng, a collection of around 400 ornate Buddhas and other figures carved right into the limestone cliffs. Lingyin is a popular pilgrimage site, and tends to be crowded, but it’s possible to hike to smaller nearby temples and through the evocative old Fayun tea village, now home to the Amanfayun. On the other side of the lush tea-growing area of Hangzhou, the Song-dynasty Liuhe Pagoda is another spectacular Buddhist building, a remarkable tower looking out over the Qiantang River like an ornate beacon.
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Explore modern design
Hangzhou’s most famous man-made sights tend to be ancient, but there’s contemporary design to be found too in this prosperous city of more than nine million residents. The Yuhang Opera House, which opened in summer 2019, was created by the studio of late Danish architect Henning Larsen to resemble an iceberg, with geometric window patterns like cracked ice casting shadows across the space. For something more strangely future-forward, the Star Avenue mall is home to a family theme park that looks like a Lewis Carroll fantasy in bubblegum pink and a branch of the Zhongshuge bookshop with mirrors and geometric shelves that make it appear like a library from outer space. Both were designed by Shanghai provocateur Li Xiang.
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Get shopping
It’s possible to go from buying traditional herbal medicines at the ancient Hefang Street to browsing Alibaba’s Freshippo store, an online-offline ‘new retail’ store where robots serve fresh food ordered via an app, and coffee comes from a self-serve Starbucks kiosk. On Yanan Road, the customers vote on which limited-edition designs from local designers will be produced at the gallery-like D2C concept store; while most malls have a branch of JNBY, the fashion brand founded by Hangzhou-born Li Lin, which now has more than 2,000 stores across the globe and a huge Renzo Piano-designed HQ in Hangzhou. Zhejiang province is also famous for its silk production, and Wensli is Hangzhou’s most prominent maker, its elegant printed silk scarves setting it up as China’s answer to Hermès.
Find out more about Hangzhou at en.gotohz.com

TopicsCondé Nast Traveller Partnership Chinese Tourism Hangzhou China Asia

Glide along the West Lake

Go traditional

Or modern

Try Longjing tea

Destination dining

Temple hopping

Explore modern design

Get shopping