Hangzhou

Hangzhou has been the definition of paradise in Chinese for eight centuries — "above there is heaven; below, Suzhou and Hangzhou" — and the West Lake is a UNESCO-listed composition of water, causeways, pagodas and willow mist. Su Dongpo, the Song dynasty's great poet, governed here and built the causeway that bears his name; Marco Polo, arriving when Hangzhou was capital of the Southern Song and perhaps the largest city on earth, called it the most splendid in the world. The Grand Canal, the empire's watery spine, ends here; the Longjing tea terraces above the lake produce China's most celebrated green tea, picked to a calendar as strict as any liturgy. The city's musical life belongs to the lake as much as to any hall: "Impression West Lake", the spectacle staged on the water itself with the lake as set and mirror, and the evening musical fountains make the shoreline a nightly auditorium, while the Zhejiang Conservatory of Music — one of China's newest and largest — trains the next generations in the hills nearby. Now doubled as a technology capital (Alibaba was born here) and host of the G20 and the Asian Games, Hangzhou demonstrates China's oldest trick: absolute modernity arranged around a view that has not changed since the Song.