Visiting China's Garden Paradise

HANGZHOU, China -- Couples stroll hand-in-hand beneath weeping willow trees, as pleasure crafts glide across tranquil lake waters. Nearby, a green patchwork of tea plantations blankets rolling hills. Farther off, misty mountains frame a scene that's right out of a classic Chinese landscape painting.

Hangzhou (hong-joe), a city of 4 million people located 110 miles from Shanghai in eastern China, has long been portrayed in Chinese story and song as a garden paradise. In recent years, paradise has acquired a dreary ring of modern suburbs, but in the historic city center, arrayed around West Lake (Xi Hu in Chinese), Hangzhou still looks and feels like a garden.

Famous in the Middle Kingdom, Hangzhou is thick with Chinese tourists, who are drawn to its historic sites, its serenity and its lush subtropical climate. To Western travelers preoccupied with Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, Hangzhou barely registers. More's the pity; it may be the prettiest city in China.

Both Hangzhou's historical and present-day attractions center on West Lake, a big body of water crossed by causeways and pedestrian bridges, some built 800 years ago when Hangzhou was the imperial capital of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279).

None of modern China's concrete culverts or sometimes-garish high-rise buildings crowd the lake. It has been preserved as the precious liquid heart of the city. West Lake is a favorite of recreational boaters, school groups on outings, lovers intent on finding some quiet time, locals setting off on walkabouts or doing tai chi in the morning, connoisseurs of gardens and parks. Virtually all the land that rings the lake is a public park.

Seen from across the street in the Shangri-la Hotel, past 300-year-old camphor trees on the hotel grounds, the lakeside park appears as a soft, barely differentiated canopy of green.

In the park, things are more dynamic and diverse. Traditional Chinese landscaping -- pruned trees and shrubs, quiet pools of water, stone statuary, pagodas with curved-rooftops -- predominates and tour groups walk the busy grounds.

The restored house of Ma Yi Fu is located there as well. Ma, who perished in 1967 during the Cultural Revolution, lived at the water's edge. His home is festooned with his belongings -- books, clothes, furniture, with explanatory texts in Chinese and English. Also lakeside is the villa where Mao Zedong used to take his ease during his visits to Hangzhou.

The cooling breezes of West Lake are best enjoyed on the water. Boats are everywhere, ranging from two-person rowboats for hire to fancifully decorated (think dragons) ferries that putter past islets and circumnavigate the lake, with its poetically named scenic spots: Lotus in the Breeze at Crooked Courtyard, Three Pools Mirroring the Moon. A turn around the lake takes about an hour.

	West Lake Causeway

At night, West Lake becomes the watery site of an imaginative, at times startling, multimedia show called "Impression West Lake." Directed by Zhang Yimou, China's most famous film director, the nightly performance is a skillfully crafted fusion of light, sound and movement. Based on an old Chinese love story, it is performed literally in and on the lake, on barges and atop platforms submerged in several inches of water. Injunctions against taking photographs are roundly ignored by fans, who brandish phone cameras in lakeside bleacher seats, trying to capture the show's visual magic.