Almost two years now into the research for a companion book to Beautiful Su, this one about Suzhou's "sister city" of Hangzhou. Hangzhou is the other half of the ancient Chinese saying, "In the sky there is heaven; here below are Suzhou and Hangzhou." Photos above are taken from a full-page ad in today's (3/29/2016) New York Times.
It's not surprising that Hangzhou would be the choice for China's first-ever hosting of the G-20. For centuries, Hangzhou was seen by the Chinese as having the nation's most singularly beautiful scene: West Lake (Xi Hu) and its surrounding hills, temples, pagodas, and monuments. Qing Dynasty emperors traveled the Grand Canal to visit there; poets and scholar-artists traveled there to admire the scenery, pen idyllic verses, and/or paint landscape scenes; the Communist government in 1949 -1950 immediately sought to revitalize Hangzhou as a people's tourist zone; Mao Zedong stayed in a lakeside villa there numerous times; and visiting foreign dignitaries including Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon (in their historic 1972 trip) were escorted there during state visits.
