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Xitang Ancient Water Town
Hangzhou and surrounding
Architecture,  Unusual places
Architecture, 
Unusual places

Those who are interested in visiting not very popular places and learning about the life of indigenous people, will definitely like traveling to the «Chinese Venice» – an old town of Xitang. The town is located on the water.

This place is so unusual that when you get there it seems you were transported from the busy modern world to the quiet and peaceful world of the past. Ancient streets paved with stone slabs, old buildings, numerous arched bridges over the river – all this looks so amazing that it is difficult to believe that it is real.

There is a legend telling that if you pass all the bridges of the «Chinese Venice», then any wish will come true. Mind that this is not so easy as there are 104 bridges in the town of Xitang. However, even if the wish does not come true, it is worth trying to pass at least half of them because each bridge is a unique structure built in the period from 1368 to 1912. The oldest bridge was built more than a thousand years ago, at the beginning of the Song dynasty which lasted from 960 to 1279. This bridge is called Wang Xian. It is devoted to one of the ancient legends about immortality and spirits that surround people in everyday life.

Some of the bridges in Xitang are very similar to the rainbow that spans over the river from one bank to another. The second looks like ancient musical instruments. The third is richly decorated with figures of magical animals. Walking across bridges is like walking through a museum where each exhibit is a real masterpiece.

The most well-preserved ancient place in the town is Shipi Lane. It is notable for the fact that, first of all, it is the oldest street in Xitang. Secondly, it is the narrowest one: the maximum width of the lane is only 1 meter, and in some places it narrows to 80 centimeters.

Life seems to be frozen in time in this place. Grandfathers play with their grandchildren on the bridges, women wash clothes in the backyard in the river that flows there, merchants place their goods on mobile carts... There you can witness the stunning contrast to the megacities of the modern China which perfectly demonstrates the diversity of the country.

Address: Xitang

Published by

Oksana Shmakova

All content and media files are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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