Things to Do in Hangzhou: A Complete Guide

West Lake sits at the center of Hangzhou the way a courtyard anchors a house — everything orients around it, and the city of twelve million people has organized itself accordingly for over a thousand years. Marco Polo called it the finest city in the world, and while that claim belongs to the thirteenth century, the geography that prompted it hasn't changed: a shallow freshwater lake ringed by forested hills on three sides and a dense modern city on the fourth. The lake itself is small enough to walk around in a morning, and doing so remains the single best introduction to a place that rewards slowness over itinerary. Start from Broken Bridge on the Bai Causeway at dawn, when tai chi groups claim the stone railings and the pagoda on Leifeng Hill catches the first light across the water. Head south through the lakeside parks toward Longjing, where the tea villages that produce China's most famous green tea sit in terraced rows above the city, and where a glass of the current season's picking costs less than a cup of coffee back home. The contrast between this rural periphery and the Wulin Road corridor twenty minutes east, where Hangzhou's tech wealth concentrates in glass towers and the flagship stores of companies headquartered here — Alibaba chief among them — defines the city's particular tension. Hangzhou is simultaneously China's classical garden showcase and one of its most aggressive technology economies, and visitors feel both registers in a single afternoon. The Hefang Street area near the Southern Song imperial palace ruins sells itself to tourists, but locals eat better in the residential blocks around Wushan and Zhongshan South Road, where Hangzhou's sweet-savory cooking — the vinegar-glazed West Lake fish, the sticky lotus root stuffed with rice — appears in restaurants that don't bother translating their menus.