# History of Hangzhou: From Liangzhu to the Modern City

> The history of Hangzhou in brief: Liangzhu jade culture, the Sui canal and walls, the Wuyue and Southern Song capitals, the treaty port and the modern city.

Canonical: https://hangzhoumemory.org/history-of-hangzhou
Updated: 2026-11-01

The history of Hangzhou runs from the Liangzhu culture of 5,000 years ago to a modern provincial capital. A county seat from 222 BC, it grew rich on the Grand Canal after 610, was a kingdom's capital in the 10th century and the Southern Song capital from 1138.

## Hangzhou at a glance

**A chronicle of Hangzhou**

| When | What happened |
| --- | --- |
| c. 3300–2300 BC | The Liangzhu culture, with rice farming and fine jade work, is centred in today's Yuhang district; the ruins of its walled city are now a World Heritage Site. |
| 222 BC | The Qin empire sets up Qiantang and Yuhang counties — the first local government on the site. |
| c. AD 1 | A sandbar cuts a lagoon off from Hangzhou Bay; it becomes West Lake. |
| 485–486 | A revolt that began in Fuyang burns the county town of Qiantang; the rebels proclaim a short-lived state of Wu there before imperial troops crush them. |
| 589 | The Sui dynasty renames the area Hang Prefecture: the first use of the name Hangzhou. |
| 591 | The first city walls are built. |
| 610 | The Jiangnan Canal is dug from Jingkou (Zhenjiang) to Hangzhou, making the city the southern end of the Grand Canal. |
| 781–784 | Six wells are bored to bring the townspeople fresh water. |
| 907–978 | Hangzhou is the capital of the Wuyue kingdom, which keeps the region at peace and builds Baochu Pagoda (963), Six Harmonies Pagoda (970) and Leifeng Pagoda (c. 975). |
| 1089 | The Su Causeway is raised from mud dredged out of West Lake. |
| 1129–1138 | The fleeing Song court renames the city Lin'an and in 1138 makes it the capital. |
| 1276–1277 | Mongol armies reach the city; the Song palace burns. Under the Yuan, Hangzhou governs a large southern province. |
| 1366 | Ming forces take the city, which becomes the capital of Zhejiang province. |
| 1508 | West Lake is dredged and the Yanggong Causeway laid. |
| 1645–1648 | The Qing take Hangzhou and wall off a quarter beside the lake for the Manchu banner garrison. |
| 1699 | The names of the [Ten Scenes of West Lake](/west-lake-ten-scenes) are carved on steles. |
| 1861–1864 | Taiping forces capture the city in December 1861; Qing forces retake it on 31 March 1864. The population collapses. |
| 1896 | Hangzhou opens to foreign trade as a treaty port, with a Japanese concession by [Gongchen Bridge](/grand-canal-hangzhou). |
| 1909 | The Shanghai–Hangzhou railway cuts the journey from three days by boat to three hours. |
| November 1911 | Revolutionary troops end Qing rule in the city within two days. |
| 1912–1913 | The garrison walls come down; the lakeside quarter becomes the New Market district, with Hubin Road and lakeside parks. |
| 1927 | The municipality of Hangzhou is created. |
| 1937 | The Qiantang River Bridge opens on 26 September and is blown up in December as Japanese troops occupy the city. |
| 3 May 1949 | The People's Liberation Army enters Hangzhou. |
| 1982 | Hangzhou is named one of China's national historic and cultural cities. |
| 2004 | The [first batch](/first-batch) of declared historic buildings is announced. |
| 2011, 2014 | West Lake (2011) and the Grand Canal (2014) are inscribed as World Heritage Sites. |
| 2016 | Hangzhou hosts the G20 leaders' summit in September. |

## 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](/grand-canal-hangzhou) 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](/hangzhou-temples) 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](/southern-song-imperial-street) and the [Ten Scenes of West Lake](/west-lake-ten-scenes) 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](/#the-five-batches) 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](/shikumen-lane-houses) and shops, while bankers and officials built [villas around the lake](/west-lake-villas).

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](/protection-regulations) and, since 2023, by a law on the historic city as a whole.

## Frequently asked questions

### How old is Hangzhou?

The county of Qiantang on the site dates from 222 BC, more than 2,200 years ago, and the name Hangzhou from 589. The Liangzhu culture flourished in the area about 5,000 years ago.

### When was Hangzhou the capital of China?

Hangzhou, then called Lin'an, was the capital of the Southern Song dynasty from 1138 until the Mongol conquest of 1276. Earlier, from 907 to 978, it was the capital of the regional Wuyue kingdom.

### Why are most of Hangzhou's historic buildings from 1900–1950?

Fires and the Taiping war of the 1860s destroyed much of the older city, and the New Market district, lane houses and lakeside villas were built in the decades after the 1911 revolution.