Misfits’ Guide to Hangzhou (杭州）

May 10, 2026

emotional responses to infrastructure, infrastructure as landscape, what is the relationship between art and architecture?

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A few bits of information¹.

Hangzhou is the capital of and largest city in Zhejiang Province but was capital of China during the Wuyue Kingdom (923-997) and again during the Song Dynasty (1138–1276).
The city is thought to have been the largest in the world from 1180 to 1315 and from 1348 to 1358. These dates seem fairly precise.
The Grand Canal (大运河), begun in the 5th century, was important transport infrastructure linking Beijing in the north with Hangzhou in the south. It is the longest artificial waterway in the world.
Marco Polo is said to have visited Hangzhou in the late 13th century, the Muslim explorer Ibn Battuta in 1345 and, in 1492, Cristoforo Colombo, having heard about Hangzhou, thought he could visit by sailing westward from Italy.
More recently, Hangzhou’s location on the Yangtze Delta led to economic grown that has now diversified into digital technologies. Companies such as Alibaba Group, Ant Group, DeepSeek and electric car manufacturer Geely are headquartered there.

These past six years I’ve been embarrassed more than once for not having visited Hangzhou, so this recent May Day long weekend I wanted to remedy that. My list of things to do and see quickly became unachievable in three days. Also, in a city recognized as “the cradle of Chinese civilization”, with a recorded history from AD 222 and that’s been known by its current name since AD 589, I had a strong sense of being someone “just passing through” even though with a city so old, I’m no more of a person passing through than anyone else is. Still, perhaps as an Australian, I’m uneasy in places having what I see as an excess of history and have always been willing to fight the corner of new cities because there simply aren’t enough old ones to go around. I stayed in a hotel just across the river from Hangzhou’s New Town so I don’t yet have a perception of Hangzhou as an old city – at least not in the European sense where every building is dripping with intimidating history. My first impression is that, for all its thousands of years of history, Hangzhou wears it lightly. To have been capital of China during the cultural flowering that was the Song Dynasty is no mean feat but there’s no sense of faded glory. For all its splendorous past, Hangzhou feels contemporary and I didn’t expect this.

West Lake (西湖）

Those times I felt embarrassed for not having visited Hangzhou were usually because somebody would say something like “What – you’ve been living in China for six years and still haven’t visited West Lake (西湖）?!!” I’d known that the Japanese didn’t bomb West Lake during WWII because it was so beautiful, and I’d recently read that most educated Chinese can recite at least one poem about West Lake my initial high expectations were dashed when I read that West Lake was man-made. However, they were quickly raised again when I learned that West Lake was created during the Eastern Han Era (25–220)² when local official [and unacknowledged hero] Hua Xin ordered the construction of a seawall to permanently separate it from the Qiantang River (钱塘江) instead of silt carried by the river periodically separating it. Replenished by the Wulin River (武林水), the lake could now serve as a water supply for the city. West Lake’s beginnings as a lake were therefore as water supply infrastructure and only later were the willow trees planted, the twelve famous pagodas and pavilions built, the poets attracted, the poems written, and the considerate bombs found somewhere else to go. In other words we should maybe start thinking infrastructure can be beautiful in ways more profound than showy structures supporting bridges or airport terminal roofs. May Day weekend was probably not the best time to go.

I’ve mentioned West Lake first because it deserves to be, not only in terms of history, but because something created in the Eastern Han Era (25–220) and that became a tourist destination in the Tang Dynasty (618–907 AD) made me think that infrastructure could be landscape. If water supply can be beautiful, then why not flood protection? Or roads? Pedestrian crossings? A CBD? Some of my examples here may be circumstantial but in Hangzhou I sensed a wanting for infrastructure to be beautiful and kept seeing efforts to make it so. This wanting could only exist if there weren’t already a feeling that infrastructure without beauty was pointless. Some future scholar may wish to write a book titled “Learning from Hangzhou.” It wouldn’t be about finding meaning in the visuals of consumer excess, but in the relevance of what really matters to the people who live in a place where beauty has been cherished for one and a half millennia.

Qiantang River (钱塘江) Embankments

In the city of Wenzhou further south, flood protection embankments along the Ouhai River are about 8-10 meters high but step up from the water level so that the lower levels can still be used to varying degrees. This isn’t a good idea along Hangzhou’s Qiangtang River as the incoming tidal wave (called a tidal bore) can be as high as nine meters (30 ft) and travel up to 40 km/h (25 mph). I learn it’s the largest and most spectacular tidal bore in the world. Never knew that. It can be surfed³, although doing so is actively discouraged. Exceptionally high tidal bores occasionally overflow the embankment walls. The 13th century woodcut below shows an early embankment and a menacing-looking tidal wave. The Qiantang River is not for pleasure craft. River traffic is mainly barges in the daytime and sightseeing boats at night. All have very long hulls.

The embankment overflow zones are about 40 meters wide and have secondary drainage reservoirs that appear as ponds rather than culverts. This is all part of an ongoing program of more than 700 kilometers of embankment improvements along the Qiantang, Fuchun and Xin’an rivers.

According to the municipality, this “greenway” “reflects the low-carbon economy, green travel, sustainable development strategies, social culture and the image of the city.” I think they could also proudly to say that it helps keep the water of the cantankerous where it should be, especially when the Qiantang River is so cantankerous.

Qiantang River Bridges

The exceptionally strong tide creates a shallow and ever-changing riverbed profile and is probably why bridges are few, and the ones there are have very significant foundations. This website describes all nine bridges. I didn’t get to see the Qiantang RiverBridge (钱塘江大桥) up close but it was the city’s first bridge in 1937. Pengbu Bridge (彭埠大桥) at the other end of Hangzhou was the second, opening 1992. The 65 years between the first and second bridges suggests that bridge building was a serious and difficult endeavour. The Xixing Brige (西兴大桥) opened in 1997 and the Fuxing Bridge (复兴大桥) in 2004. The first and the last bridges are both two-level bridges, suggesting a need for maximum efficiency of fewer foundations and I expect the volatile tides have something to do with this.

Rather than building a second or parallel bridge, Xixing Bridge is being reconstructed to have increased safety and capacity and is due to re-open next year. The same foundations are being used.

Traffic Tunnels 1

The Zhejiang Road Tunnel⁴ opened in December, 2025. It holds records in China for a municipal tunnel project bypassing the greatest number of national-level cultural properties, the highest level of difficulty of implementation, and the most stringent protection requirements (as it traverses a seismic fault). I will return to the theme of this post in a bit, but this piece of infrastructure is better thought of as not taking beauty away, rather than as adding to it. Total length 6.2 kilometers. There’s also The Zizhi Tunnel that passes beneath the West Lake Scenic Area. Another two traffic tunnels pass under the Qiantang River as well as nine metro system tunnels. I have a lot of respect for this, especially when the below-ground geology is not the best. I think it’s a sense of being part of something greater than oneself, and a part of that is not wanting to be remembered as the ones that screwed up this thousand and-a-half year plus project that is Hangzhou.

Pedestrian Underpasses

I might be overthinking it, but I see this desire to spread traffic across different levels in the older part of town where many intersections have underpasses that are increasingly connected to the basement levels of buildings. At one intersection, a robot traffic warden watches for overground jaywalkers. A scramble crossing marks the change in priority from road traffic to pedestrian traffic around Longxiangqiao Station (龙翔桥站, “Dragon Soaring Bridge”) on Line 1 that passes through the historic and most crowded part of Hangzhou. This scramble crossing may be there because there simply wasn’t space underground. Line 1 was the first metro line and opened in 2012. It’s the crimson line in the map above. The other 11 lines were built in the 14 [!!] years since. They’re an underground monument to Hangzhou’s preference – or should I say feelings of responsibility? – to put things in tunnels rather than be accused by later generations of disfiguring the surface above.

Median Strips

Hangzhou isn’t the only city in China or the world to have planted median strips along dual carriageways but this is the first time I’ve seen them planted with roses. That weekend, roses were in full bloom across China, and I was reminded that the Hybrid Tea Rose popular in Britain in the 19th century was a cross between an English hedge rose and a Chinese rose⁵ that blooms continually throughout the warm months.

Traffic Tunnels 2

I’m definitely not overthinking the Jiangnan Avenue Tunnel between the Shidai Elevated Road (leading to Fuxing Bridge) and Airport City Road (bottom left and upper right respectively, below.）The traffic capacity of Jiangnan Avenue was doubled on this stretch by making a tunnel below the existing road rather than by an elevated road above as in Shanghai or Tokyo for example). Jiangnan Avenue Tunnel opened only last year.

Jiangnan Avenue Tunnel Interchanges

It works fine but at each end the surface road and its additional capacity below have to merge for interchanges that are located above ground because that’s where the bridges are and also because lane-changing inside tunnels is never a good idea. Below is a slideshow of what the Shidai Elevated Road interchange looks like. It’s amazing. This is not about heat islands. We’ve all seen AI generated images of wondrous verdant cities of the future but actually experiencing this beautiful and somehow primeval infrastructure shouldn’t feel as surreal as it does. I suspect Hangzhou people just see it as natural.

Plants on the Airport Road interchange aren’t as well established but are coming along nicely.

Qianjiang New City

The CBD is located in the part of town called New Town and is a cluster of office buildings around a symbolic center comprising Hanzhou International Conference Center shaped like The Sun, and the Hangzhou Grand Theatre shaped like The Moon. On the left below is the tourist image. The on-axis buildings are the Hangzhou People’s Government Building and Citizens’ Center. The 2010 “sun” and the 2004 “moon” were designed by Carlos Ott⁶.

The remainder of the CBD is not trying to attract our attention.

Until night-time when more than thirty buildings create the Qianjiang New Town LED Light Show. The sun and moon buildings don’t participate. Perhaps they sense that an architecture of individual buildings having what we once thought was meaning has run its course?

The light show runs at 7:30–7:45pm and 8:30–8:45pm but the times didn’t seem to be that fixed. Before the show are short teasers and afterwards there’s sometimes an encore. It’s mesmerizing and immediate and definitely not architecture as we know it. It’s far more real than mere images of buildings so that’s an improvement. Moreover, light shows such as these are doing things painting can’t because the imagery is generated on the surfaces of a pincushion of buildings whose surfaces don’t create a flat plane as with film, video and painting. These surfaces can be seen from all directions and motion graphic artists somewhere are working to create visual content that makes use of this partial continuity. Unsurprisingly, upwards motion seems more awesome than sideways. I don’t know if light shows like this are art but they are a new type of visual spectacle, the medium of which is buildings and the simpler the better. Shape-ey buildings are no longer needed. (After dark, it’s interesting how uninteresting the gold sphere building becomes.) Light shows aren’t permanent but, like peach blossoms around reservoirs and foliage on flyovers, they are examples of infrastructure as landscape that evokes emotional responses. Architecture needn’t feel obliged to provide us with civic spectacle. A group of buildings, a few lights and some motion graphic artistry can generate emotional responses more powerful than any one building. In the last clip below, that Maori-tattoo (?) inspired few seconds when even the outlines of buildings dissolve, are magical. We’re seeing something bigger than some mere building. You’ll see what I mean.