Hangzhou tourist information

The celebrated Neolithic culture of Hemudu has been discovered to have inhabited this area as far back as seven thousand years ago, when rice was first cultivated in southeastern China.

The city of Hangzhou was founded about 2,200 years ago during the Qin Dynasty, it is listed as one of the Seven Ancient Capitals of China, but the city wall was not constructed until the Sui Dynasty (591). It was the capital of the Wuyue Kingdom for more than 200 years, during the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms Period.

In 1089, Su Shi constructed a 2.8 km long dike across the West Lake, which Qing Emperor Qianlong considered particularly attractive in the early morning of the spring time. The lake, which itself is artificial, is largely surrounded by mountains. The Baoshi Pagoda sits on one of these hills to the north.

Hangzhou was the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty from the early 12th century until the Mongol invasion of 1276, and was known as Lin'an. It served as the seat of the imperial government, a center of trade and entertainment, and the nexus of the main branches of the civil service. During that time, the city was the gravity centre of Chinese civilization as what used to be considered the "central China" in the north was taken by the Jin, an ethnic minority dynasty. Numerous philosophers, politicians, and men of literature, including some of the most celebrated poets in Chinese history such as Su Shi, Lu You, and Xin Qiji came here to live and die.

During the Southern Song Dynasty, commercial expansion, an influx of refugees from the conquered north, and the growth of the official and military establishments, led to a corresponding population increase and the city developed well outside its 9th century ramparts. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Hangzhou had a population of over 2 million at that time, while Historian Jacques Gernet has estimated that the population of Hangzhou numbered well over one million by 1276. (Official Chinese census figures from the year 1270 listed some 186,330 families in residence and probably failed to count non-residents and soldiers.) It is believed that Hangzhou was the largest city in the world from 1180 to 1315 and from 1348 to 1358.

The Venetian Marco Polo visited Hangzhou in the late 13th century and referred to the city as "beyond dispute the finest and the noblest in the world." "The number and wealth of the merchants, and the amount of goods that passed through their hands, was so enormous that no man could form a just estimate thereof."

Because of the large population and densely-crowded (often multi-story) wooden buildings, Hangzhou was particularly vulnerable to fires. Major conflagrations destroyed large sections of the city in 1132, 1137, 1208, 1229, 1237, and 1275 while smaller fires occurred nearly every year. The 1237 fire alone was recorded to have destroyed 30,000 dwellings. To combat this threat, the government established an elaborate system for fighting fires, erected watchtowers, devised a system of lantern and flag signals to identify the source of the flames and direct the response, and charged more than 3,000 soldiers with the task of putting out fires.

The city remained an important port until the middle Ming Dynasty when its harbor slowly silted up.

As late as the latter part of the 16th and early 17th centuries, the city was an important center of Chinese Jewry, and may have been the original home of the more well-known Kaifeng Jewish community.

Hangzhou was ruled by the Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi ) from 1928 to 1949. On May 3, 1949, the People's Liberation Army entered Hangzhou and the city came under Communist control.