Lovely West Lake, near scenic Hangzhou on China’s east coast, has
been celebrated as a major tourist site since the twelfth century.
Now as then, visitors boat to its islands, stroll through its
gardens, worship in its temples, and immortalize it in poetry and
painting. Hangzhou and West Lake have long served as icons of
Chinese landscape appreciation, literary and artistic expression,
and tourism. In the first in-depth English-language study of this
picturesque locale, Xiaolin Duan examines the interplay between
human enterprise and the natural environment during the Song
dynasty (960–1279). After the Song lost north China to the
Jurchens and the imperial court fled south, a new capital was
established at Hangzhou, making the area the national political and
cultural center. West Lake became a model for idealized nature,
fashioned by the diverse activities of its visitors. Duan shows how
engagements in, on, and around West Lake influenced visitors’
conceptualization of nature and sparked the emergence of the lake
as a tourist destination, highlighting how the natural landscape
played a role in shaping social and cultural constructs.
Incorporating evidence from miscellanies, local and temple
gazetteers, paintings, maps, poems, and anecdotes, The Rise of West
Lake explores the complexity of the lake as an interactive site
where ecological and economic concerns contended and where
spiritual pursuits overlapped with aesthetic ones.
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