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FOCUS ON
West Lake 西湖One of the first rhyming Chinoiserie sayings students learn is: 'Above there is Heaven, on earth there are Suzhou and Hangzhou' (Shang you tiantang, Xia you Su Hang 上有天堂，下有蘇杭). These cities with their attendant 'famous sites'—Tiger Hill (Huqiu 虎丘) in the case of Suzhou and West Lake (Xihu 西湖) in Hangzhou—were and are noted not only for their scenery but also because of the skein of historical and literary meaning that embraces, sometimes entangles, them. The art historian Jonathan Hay called Hangzhou and Suzhou two of the 'leisure zones', that is city-scenic areas, in the Lower Yangtze Valley (Jiangnan 江南) where a particular culture of refined indulgence developed around temples, pleasure boats, tea houses, eating places, courtesan's quarters and wine shops.  Fig.1 A designated viewpoint on the eastern bank of West Lake, next to Hupan Ju 湖畔居 teahouse, October 2011. (Photograph: GRB) The depredations of civil war (from the time of the Taiping War in the mid-nineteenth century), foreign rapacity, invasion and revolution (Republican as well as the varied ructions carried out in the name of continuous revolution in the People's Republic) left both cities in grimy decay. In the post-1978 reformist era, mass tourism, guided nostalgia and local identity have helped provide the rationale—and the resources—for both cities to reinvent themselves, and to recall, as well as to exploit, the past. This issue of China Heritage Quarterly takes as its focus West Lake, the defining landscape of Hangzhou, capital of one of China's richest provinces, Zhejiang. As Duncan Campbell, a scholar whose work on West Lake inspired this issue tells us, Hangzhou's West Lake was but one of over thirty identically named sites in dynastic China. It was only from the Tang dynasty (618-907CE) that this particular West Lake gradually displaced all the others and became the West Lake. In the following millennium it evolved into a lieu de mémoire around which poetry, works in prose and latterly painting have continuously produced a layering or sedimentation of meaning, reference, as well as cliché. It is West Lake represented and evoked that at times would seem to obliterate, or at least occlude, its very reality. We approach West Lake anew, not merely as a fabled dynastic 'leisure zone', but more as a place where the pursuit of culture has constantly intermingled with the practice of politics, where the wealth of its denizens has risen and fallen in tandem with the economic strength of Zhejiang and surrounds. It is a place where memory and nostalgia jostle with the lived. While the constructed (and tirelessly reconstructed) past may threaten to constrain the present, still the sheer physical variety and beauty of the Lake and its environs even manage to thwart today's cultural and political engineers. In Features we explore West Lake's physical reality and cultural heritage via various avenues and from different angles, as well as through its changing dynastic, Republican and post-1949 fate. Duncan Campbell locates the lake in a tradition of landscape and introduces the 'Ten Scenes of West Lake' (Xihu Shi Jing 西湖十景), a codification of its scenery that forms a web of poetic, artistic and cultural association. It is through the site-essays of the late-Ming early-Qing writer and historian Zhang Dai—works famous for a unique 'dream nostalgia'—in particular that we encounter at once a place that is a physical reality, a literary realm and a social world. In her work on the West Lake during the reign of the Qing Kangxi emperor, as well as on the early years of the Republic of China, Liping Wang traces the unbroken threads in the fabric of the area as well as discussing the dramatic changes to Qing Hangzhou—the near overnight destruction of the Bannerman Battalion that cut the city proper off from the Lake with which it had so long been associated, and the creation of new commercial and tourist centres. The 'invention' of tradition is a trope that has become popular in international discussions of the past and identity in recent decades, but inventing tradition lies at the very heart of elite Chinese articulations of time. The rediscovery and reformulation of the past is part of a profound movement in cultural practice, one in which renewal is sought through revival or a 'return to the antique' (fu gu 復古). In the revival of West Lake following its less-than-stately neglect during the Cultural Revolution era (c.1964-78), a studied return to the ancient and a manufactured cherishing of the past (huai gu 懷古) have been married to the commercial and political imperatives of the present. At a time in late 2011, early 2012, when the Communist Party re-affirms its half-century opposition to 'the West' and rejection of foreign efforts to undermine Chinese politics and society through a soft-cultural strategy of 'peaceful evolution', we do well to recall that West Lake has, from as early as the Song dynasty, not merely been a place of refined diversion, for it has also been a site of powerful political contestation. The Party's present anti-Western stance was, after all, first articulated half a century ago by Mao Zedong at the Dahua Hotel on West Lake in November 1959. It is important to recall that, during the High Maoist era (mid 1950s to 1976), many momentous political decisions that profoundly affected the country as a whole were made at the lakeside villas and guesthouses of Mao and his comrades. Also in Features we introduce the China Heritage Glossary, an attempt to offer new insights into old words, as well as providing alternative interpretations of new expressions. In T'ien Hsia we carry another chapter from Pierre Ryckmans' (Simon Leys) 1996 Boyer Lectures, this time the subject he address is reading. We also reprint a powerful statement by the novelist Murong Xuecun and pay further tribute to the translator, essayist and novelist Yang Jiang. In Articles we conclude our retrospective on the Xinhai year of 1911 by reproducing an essay on Luo Zhenyu (Lo Chen-yü) and the Waste of Yin, while in New Scholarship we mark the online publication of East Asian History, introduce important new websites, and carry a number of conference and workshop reports. This is the most ambitious issue of the Quarterly to date. Even so much has been overlooked and neglected. We can only hope to expand on this rich and complex topic/trope/topos in future issues. AcknowledgmentsThe scale and range of this issue of China Heritage Quarterly requires that I acknowledge at greater length than usual the contributions of colleagues both locally and internationally. I am particularly grateful to Duncan Campbell, a Contributing Editor of the journal who has helped me conceptualize this issue. Duncan's extraordinarily rich contributions have been crucial both to the style and to content of the issue as a whole. I would also like to thank Mark Elliott of Harvard University for suggesting that I approach Liping Wang, a scholar who has generously allowed us to reprint her work on Republican-era West Lake as well as to carry her new research on the Qing emperor Kangxi and West Lake. Eugene Y. Wang, also of Harvard, has been extremely kind in giving us permission to make available here two of his striking insightful meditations on the Lake, its images and their continuing cultural resonances. Eugene's assistant Jia Yan found time on Christmas Eve 2011 to scan material and search out illustrative materials. One of our young scholars at ANU, Tim Cronin, gave freely of his time to translate Zhou Zuoren's contentious meditation on the 'patriot' Yue Fei and the 'traitor' Qin Gui, which he introduces with considerable flair, and our long-term colleague, the art historian Claire Roberts, has generously allowed us to reproduce a section from a new book on Chinese photography as well as an essay on and an interview with the Hangzhou-trained video artist Yang Fudong. We would also acknowledge the support of Gene Sherman and Dolla Merrillees and the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation in granting us permission to reprint this material and the accompanying stills from Yang's work. The noted Hangzhou-based scholar Chen Xing contributed an essay on Feng Zikai, Zheng Zhenduo and West Lake, as well as material related to the revived scholastic journal Aesthetic Education. Other contributors include: Stephen McDowall, Linda Jaivin, Sandrine Catris, David Brophy, Nathan Woolley and Thomas Mullaney. Wang Yaoming and Sang Ye have also provided guidance and advice. As ever, Nancy Chiu has enriched the visual dimension of the journal by helping scan illustrative material and Lois Conner, friend, colleague and long-term collaborator, has been unstinting in her generosity with the work that she has made in Hangzhou and at West Lake since 1984. All have given their time and energy to make this a particularly special issue of China Heritage Quarterly. My Associate Editor, Daniel Sanderson, has laboured long hours over the holiday season. Without his contribution this issue would have remained little more than a fancy. During 2012, China Heritage Quarterly will focus on the following topics: Tea (March); The China Critic (June); Fakes, Phonies and Forgeries (September); and, Nanjing (December). —Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage Quarterly
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