Ten Scenes of West Lake: Hangzhou's Classic Views

Where the ten scenes are

West Lake lies on the west side of the old city: about 3.2 km from north to south and 2.8 km from east to west, with a shoreline of 15 km and an average depth of only 2.27 m. Hills close it in on the north, west and south. Its landscape is often summed up as one hill, two pagodas, three islets, four causeways and five lakes, and since 2011 it has been a World Heritage Site as the West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou.

Nine of the ten sit on or beside the water: three on the Su Causeway or at its ends, two at either end of the Bai Causeway, one on an island and three on the south and south-east shores. The tenth, the Twin Peaks, is a view of the hills from the road west of the lake.

The ten scenes one by one

1. Spring Dawn at Su Causeway (苏堤春晓)

The Su Causeway crosses the west side of the lake for almost 2.8 km, from Huagang in the south to Quyuan in the north, and divides the Outer West Lake from the smaller West Inner Lake. It was raised in 1089 from mud and weeds dredged out of the lake, and six bridges — Yingbo, Suolan, Wangshan, Yadi, Dongpu and Kuahong — let boats pass between the two waters. Willows and peach trees line it, which is why the scene belongs to a spring morning; its stele stands by Yadi Bridge.

2. Breeze-ruffled Lotus at Quyuan Garden (曲院风荷)

In the Southern Song a government brewery stood here among lotus ponds, and the scene was the lotus breeze at the brewery. In 1699 the imperial inscription wrote the first word as "winding courtyard", which sounds the same, and turned "lotus breeze" into "breeze-ruffled lotus" — the name used ever since. The garden at 89 Beishan Street reopened in 1983 after rebuilding; it covers 28 ha and grows more than 200 varieties of lotus, the largest lotus garden in China.

3. Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake (平湖秋月)

For centuries this scene had no fixed spot: it meant drifting on the lake on an autumn night to watch the moon. When the steles were set up in 1699, officials placed this one at the south-east corner of Gushan, where the Bai Causeway reaches the island, on the old site of a lakeside pavilion; a stone terrace there juts out over the water. A Cantonese instrumental piece of the 1930s borrows the name.

4. Lingering Snow on Broken Bridge (断桥残雪)

The Broken Bridge, at the east end of the Bai Causeway, is not broken. One explanation of the name is the view after snow: the sun clears the crown of the arch first while both ends stay white, so from Baoshi Hill the bridge seems cut in two. In the Southern Song it was also called Baoyou or Duanjia Bridge; the present bridge was rebuilt in 1921. In the Legend of the White Snake it is where the two lovers first meet.

5. Leifeng Pagoda in Evening Glow (雷峰夕照)

Leifeng Pagoda stands on a low hill on the south shore, facing Baochu Pagoda across the lake. The Wuyue kingdom built it between about 972 and 977 to hold a Buddhist relic. It lost its wooden eaves to fire in the 16th century, and the bare brick tower, weakened by people prising out bricks they believed lucky, collapsed on 25 September 1924. A new pagoda over the old foundations was completed on 25 October 2002. The scene is the pagoda in the setting sun.

6. Three Pools Mirroring the Moon (三潭印月)

Lesser Yingzhou, the largest island in the lake at 7.07 ha, is built around ponds — an island in the lake with a lake in the island. Off its south-western shore stand three small stone pagodas. Pagodas were first set in the lake in 1089 to mark where no water chestnuts could be grown, so that the lake would not silt up; the present three date from a rebuilding in 1621. Each has five round openings, and on Mid-Autumn nights candles behind paper in the openings throw more moons onto the water.

7. Orioles Singing in the Willows (柳浪闻莺)

On the south-east shore, between the sites of the old Qingbo and Yongjin city gates, a park of about 21 ha keeps the willows of this scene. It began as Jujing Garden, an imperial garden of the Southern Song; it later fell into neglect and was for a time a burial ground before being laid out again as an open park. The Temple of the Qian Kings stands at its northern end.

8. Twin Peaks Piercing the Clouds (双峰插云)

This scene is a view rather than a place: the South Peak (257 m) and the North Peak (314 m) west of the lake, each once crowned by a pagoda, appearing and vanishing in the mist. The pagodas are long gone. The stele pavilion stands by Hongchun Bridge on the road west of the lake; Lingyin Temple lies at the foot of the North Peak, and a cable car climbs its eastern side.

9. Viewing Fish at Flower Pond (花港观鱼)

Huagang, at the south end of the Su Causeway, is a park of ponds stocked with thousands of red carp, which visitors come to feed, and of peony beds around a central pavilion. Gang here is the local Wu word for a small river, not a harbour: Huagang was a stream running down from Huajia Hill.

10. Evening Bell at Nanping Hill (南屏晚钟)

The bell is that of Jingci Temple below Nanping Hill on the south shore, founded in 954 and ranked in the Southern Song among the five great Chan monasteries. A great bell cast in the early Ming hung here until it was lost in the wars of the late Qing. A new bell, made with the help of a Zen temple in Japan, was dedicated on 21 November 1986.

How the list came about

The ten names first appear in writing in a Southern Song geography of 1239, and a map of 1268 marks them alongside 400 other famous places; painters of the capital were already illustrating the ten views of the four seasons. The idea was not fixed at first: the Yuan dynasty had a different set of ten, several of them away from the lake, and Ming writers added others.

In 1699 a Qing emperor touring the south wrote out the ten names, changing some of them slightly, and local officials carved each on a stele sheltered by a pavilion at the scene. A later emperor added a poem to the back of each stele on every one of his six visits between 1751 and 1784. In the 18th century longer lists of eighteen and then twenty-four scenes were drawn up, but the ten kept their place.

During the Cultural Revolution nine of the ten imperial steles were smashed. The Su Causeway stele was broken and sunk in the lake, and the Quyuan stele was hidden under the water by heritage staff; both were recovered afterwards, and the other eight were recarved from old rubbings. In 2013 the Ten Scenes, with the Mid-Lake Pavilion and Ruangong Islet, became a Major Historical and Cultural Site Protected at the National Level.

Seeing them on foot

All ten can be seen in a long day's walk round the lake, with one boat ride. A natural order starts at the Broken Bridge on the north-east shore, follows the Bai Causeway to Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake on Gushan, continues west to Quyuan, walks the length of the Su Causeway to Huagang, and turns east along the south shore to Leifeng Pagoda and Jingci Temple, finishing at the Willows park on the way back to the city. Three Pools Mirroring the Moon is on an island and is reached by boat; the Twin Peaks are best seen from the road west of the lake.

The north shore below Baoshi Hill is also where many of the city's listed lakeside villas stand: Baoqing Villa, Sui Lu Villa and The Former Site of Zhaoxian Temple are all on Beishan Road, between the Broken Bridge and Quyuan.

The new ten and the 2007 ten

The classic ten are not the only list. In 1985 a public vote chose ten more views, mostly in the hills and villages around the lake, and in 2007 a third vote added another ten. Neither has displaced the old list; both are covered on the New Ten Scenes of West Lake page.