History of Hangzhou: From Liangzhu to the Modern City

Hangzhou at a glance

Before the city

Five thousand years ago the sea reached much further inland than today, and the people of the Liangzhu culture farmed rice on the higher ground north-west of the present city. Their walled settlement, with its jade discs and tubes, is the reason Hangzhou counts its history in millennia rather than centuries. Fossil teeth found in Jiande in 1974 show that people lived in the area tens of thousands of years earlier.

After the Qin conquest of 222 BC the place was a modest county, Qiantang, under a commandery governed from Suzhou or Shaoxing. Its fortunes turned on geography: it lay where the Qiantang River meets the plain, and the lagoon that became West Lake gave it fresh water.

The canal city: Sui and Tang

The Sui dynasty gave the city its name in 589, built its first walls in 591 and in 610 ordered the Jiangnan Canal dug from the Yangtze to Hangzhou — according to the chronicles more than 800 li long and wide enough for the imperial dragon boats. From then on Hangzhou was where the Grand Canal met the Qiantang River and the sea routes of the south-east; the Grand Canal page follows the waterway through the city.

Under the Tang the county name was written with a different character, Qiantang 钱塘, to avoid the dynasty's own name. Prefects bored wells for drinking water and built up the lake's banks for irrigation, and by the 9th century Hangzhou was one of the great prefectures of the south-east.

Two capitals: Wuyue and the Southern Song

When the Tang empire broke up, Hangzhou became the capital of the small Wuyue kingdom (907–978). Its rulers kept out of the wars of the north, raised seawalls against the tidal bore and filled the hills with Buddhist temples and pagodas — the origin of the city's name as a Buddhist kingdom of the south-east, described on the temples and pagodas page.

In 1127 northern China fell to the Jurchen Jin, and the Song court fled south. It renamed Hangzhou Lin'an and in 1138 made it the capital. For almost 140 years it was the political, economic and cultural centre of the Song: a gazetteer of the 1260s counts more than 1.24 million people in the prefecture, and silk, paper, printing, ceramics and shipbuilding flourished. The Imperial Street and the Ten Scenes of West Lake both date from these years.

Yuan, Ming and Qing

The Mongols took the city in 1276 without destroying it, and Hangzhou governed a wide southern province under the Yuan; foreign travellers described it as the finest city in the world. Under the Ming and Qing it was the capital of Zhejiang, a centre of silk weaving and publishing, and home to shops whose names survive, from scissors makers to the Hu Qing Yu Tang pharmacy of 1874.

The Qing walled off a quarter beside the lake for the Manchu garrison in 1648, and emperors on tour in 1689–1784 rebuilt and celebrated the West Lake scenery. The Taiping war of the 1860s was the city's worst disaster: it changed hands twice, and its population fell from several hundred thousand to a fraction of that.

The modern city

Most of Hangzhou's declared historic buildings belong to the century that followed. The treaty port of 1896 brought a concession and new mills to the canal at Gongchen Bridge; the railway of 1909 brought Shanghai within three hours. After the 1911 revolution the garrison walls were taken down, and on their site rose the New Market district, its grid of streets filled with stone-gate lane houses and shops, while bankers and officials built villas around the lake.

The municipality was created in 1927, and the West Lake Exposition of 1929 and the Qiantang River Bridge of 1937 announced a modern provincial capital — until war and occupation from December 1937. Since 1949 the city has grown many times over; its old core is protected by the historic building regulations and, since 2023, by a law on the historic city as a whole.