How the day is built
Hangzhou is the longest of our Shanghai day trips, and the one where the train is the sensible choice: the high-speed service covers the distance in far less time than the road, and we will build the day around it if you prefer. Either way the programme is the same - the lake in the morning, the tea hills after lunch, and Shanghai again in the evening.
We keep the lake itself to the western shore and the causeways, staying out of the commercial frontage on the east side, which is where most of the traffic and most of the tour groups are.
West Lake
West Lake was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List on 24 June 2011, at the 35th session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris. It is China's forty-first World Heritage property and the only one of its kind that is a lake, and it was entered as a cultural landscape rather than a natural site - which is the point of it. Its inscribed area is about 43.3 square kilometres, and the lake itself covers 6.38 square kilometres at normal water level.
The form is a set of relationships rather than a single building: one hill, two pagodas, three islands, three causeways and five stretches of water. The causeways are the part to walk. The Bai Causeway and the Su Causeway are both the visible product of dredging works organised by two of the greatest writers of the Tang and Song, Bai Juyi and Su Shi, which is to say that the landscape was designed by poets working as administrators. The Ten Views of West Lake, the most famous example of the Chinese practice of giving scenery a poetic title, was codified over centuries; the landscape as a whole began in the ninth century, took its present shape in the thirteenth and reached its height in the eighteenth.
Lunch
Lunch near the lake - Hangzhou cooking is delicate, and the lake fish and the braised pork are the standard orders.
The Longjing tea hills
Longjing tea is not an afterthought to the lake; the tea gardens are one of the six elements that make up the inscribed property. The village of Longjing sits in the hills south-west of the water, is known as the first village of the tea country, and the eighteen imperial tea bushes at Laolongjing are among the most carefully kept plants in China. In the picking season the slopes are worked by hand and the leaf is pan-fired within hours of coming off the bush, which is the process that gives the tea its flat shape and its chestnut smell.
A picking, pan-firing and tasting session in the tea hills can be arranged on request, is subject to the growers' confirmation, and is charged locally - usually in the region of CNY 170 to 200 per person depending on the season and the group size. It is not included in the price shown.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
