Hangzhou
— — a city built around a lake the poets kept.
Not only on a wall.
“Hangzhou holds West Lake the way a hand holds water. Tang and Song poets wrote about it for a thousand years before Marco Polo called it the finest city he had seen. The Su and Bai causeways still cross the lake at the places the two poets put them. Longjing tea grows in the hills to the west. The Grand Canal arrives from Beijing at the city's northern edge.
Hangzhou, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Hangzhou is the capital of Zhejiang Province on China's east coast, about 180 km southwest of Shanghai. The municipality holds roughly 12 million residents. The city grew around West Lake (Xi Hu), a freshwater lake of about 6.4 square kilometres that has been shaped by human hand for more than a thousand years. Hangzhou served as the capital of the Southern Song dynasty from 1138 to 1276, when it became one of the largest cities in the world. The southern terminus of the Grand Canal, in continuous use since the seventh century, reaches the city's northern edge.
West Lake covers about 6.4 square kilometres on three sides of a low ridge; the fourth side opens onto the old city. UNESCO inscribed the West Lake Cultural Landscape in 2011, citing more than a millennium of garden, causeway, and pavilion design. The Su Causeway, attributed to the poet-governor Su Shi, was completed in 1090. The Bai Causeway carries the name of the earlier Tang poet Bai Juyi. Ten classical viewpoints, fixed by Song-era convention, still organize how visitors move around the water.
The lake reads differently in each of the four seasons, and the classical Ten Scenes name some of them directly: Spring Dawn on the Su Causeway, Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake, Lingering Snow on the Broken Bridge. Longjing tea is hand-picked in the hills west of the lake from late March through early May, with the pre-Qingming harvest fetching the highest prices. Lotus opens across the eastern bays in July. The Mid-Autumn Festival in September draws crowds for the moon over the water.