Paradise on earth — West Lake, Longjing tea, and the world's most famous canal
Hangzhou is China's most poetic city — Marco Polo called it 'the finest and most splendid city in the world', and West Lake's willow-draped pavilions, moon bridges, and pagoda-topped hills have inspired Chinese landscape painting for a thousand years. The UNESCO-listed West Lake sits at the heart of the city, and the surrounding tea hills produce Longjing (Dragon Well) tea, the finest green tea in China.
Hangzhou served as the capital of the Southern Song dynasty from 1127 to 1279 — a period when the city held over one million people and was arguably the world's wealthiest city, famed for silk, porcelain, and the Grand Canal trade. The city's reputation as a pleasure garden survived the Mongol conquest, the Ming dynasty, and Qing rule. West Lake was inscribed as a UNESCO Cultural Landscape in 2011.