West Lake
— — the lake the poets kept rewriting.
Not only on a wall.
“West of Hangzhou, a freshwater lake the Chinese have been writing about for a thousand years. The Bai Causeway and the Su Causeway cross it — both named for the poets who governed the city and reshaped its shores. In summer the lotus opens. In autumn the mist sits low over the Three Pools. The lake has fixed the shape of every Chinese garden since.
West Lake, 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.
West Lake (Xī Hú) sits on the western edge of Hangzhou, capital of Zhejiang Province, about 175 kilometres south-west of Shanghai. The lake covers roughly 6.4 square kilometres and is enclosed on three sides by low forested hills. Two causeways divide it — Bai Causeway, attributed to Tang poet Bai Juyi, and Su Causeway, raised in 1090 under Song poet-governor Su Shi. UNESCO inscribed the West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou as a World Heritage site in 2011, citing its formative influence on Chinese garden design across East Asia.
The lake is shallow — average depth around 2.3 metres — fed by hill streams and held by the two causeways into a calm, mirror-like surface. The famous Three Pools Mirroring the Moon are small stone pagodas in the southern basin, first raised in 1621, lit with candles at mid-autumn so the holes in their walls cast a ring of moons across the water. Lotus opens in July and August. By November the surface goes glassy and the mist comes down off Geling Hill in long sheets.
Song-dynasty critics fixed ten canonical views of West Lake around 1100, each tied to a season or hour: Spring Dawn at Su Causeway, Lotus in the Breeze at the Winding Courtyard, Autumn Moon over the Calm Lake, Snow Remnants on the Broken Bridge. The names still mark the visitor maps. Leifeng Pagoda, on the southern shore, fell in 1924 and was rebuilt in 2002; the new tower holds the original brick base in a glass crypt below. Each of the four seasons carries its own assigned view.