Where Heaven Touches Earth: The One Read That Will Make You Truly Understand Hangzhou

This city has never produced profound philosophers, suffering poets, or tragic novelists. A thousand years ago, someone described it as “frivolous.” A preference for safety is its destiny, which dramatically shapes the city’s personality. It yields loyal ministers but not fierce generals, literati but not philosophers, merchants but not gamblers, Zen discussants but not ascetic monks. Even on the rare occasion it produces a king, he lacks the ambition to vie for the Central Plains of China. This is a city without a rejecting disposition; it is enveloped by beautiful landscapes and has always remained captive to them. The people here approach everything with insufficient intensity, preferring to leave themselves an escape route. If Hangzhou possesses a so-called “city character,” it arises from four elements: “worldly Buddhist style,” “humanistic West Lake,” “years of preference for safety,” and “canal commerce.” Buddhism forms the soul, West Lake the sinew, preference for safety the personality, and commerce the flesh. These elements emerge in dramatic ways across different eras, thereby molding every individual who lives in this secular realm. Hangzhou residents excel at turning all matters into business, living business as everyday routine, and immersing their days in one elaborate pretext after another.

Hangzhou and West Lake were shaped through a long process of evolution. Hui Li infused them with the spiritual essence of Buddhist Zen. Bai Juyi rediscovered West Lake. Qian Liu fixed the spatial form of the city of Hangzhou. In the hands of Su Dongpo, this development reached a kind of cultural and symbolic elevation. He defined the personality of West Lake. “Preference for safety” serves as the designation of the Southern Song regime in Chinese historical records, seemingly a term unique to it. Clearly, “preference for safety” is a concept more derogatory than complimentary. During the over one hundred years when the capital was set in Lin’an, those emperors residing in the cramped palaces at the foot of Phoenix Mountain resembled a joke. They were surrounded daily by calls of “Northern Expedition, Northern Expedition,” yet had to feign indifference. Some aspects of the urban character of people in Hangzhou today, such as a preference for comfort, an avoidance of political discussion, enthusiasm for investment and business, and a fondness for everyday gossip, may well have their roots in those years of Lin’an. “Preference” is a choice, while “safety” is a posture; together, they create a cautious sense of security that gradually forms a collective unconscious and a way of life shared across eras. A city that embraces a preference for safety resembles an introverted yet self contented existence: it is unaggressive, reluctant to refuse, drawn to visible pleasures and immediate enjoyment, often blurring the boundary between simplicity and superficiality, and treating mere survival as the highest principle of life. The people of Hangzhou are not without courage; rather, their courage lies deeply concealed, expressed in a quiet and subtle form that dares only to contend with time itself.

In Hangzhou, people call youtiao “you zha gui er,” a name that expresses their anger toward Qin Hui. Another local snack wraps fried dough sticks and scallions inside a flatbread, then presses and roasts or deep fries it in an iron pan until crisp and golden. This is called “cong bao gui er.” Because Qin Hui was responsible for the death of Yue Fei, he has been repeatedly “fried” in Hangzhou’s oil for hundreds of years.