It is spring now! You should look around and you will see the beautiful scenery. Today Miracle Mandarin will introduce you a famous tourist city—Hangzhou. A famous say: 上有天堂，下有苏杭(Shànɡ yǒu tiāntánɡ, xià yǒu Sū Hánɡ). It means: Just as there is paradise in heaven, there are Suzhou and Hangzhou on earth.
If you arrive by airplane, before the touchdown you must have already been pleasantly surprised to see a fascinating picture, in which the West Lake looks like a sparkling pearl imbedded in between a blue smudge of mountains and a metropolitan city, with the zigzagging Qiantang River floating by like a silver ribbon.
Yes, the West Lake has all along been extolled as a sparkling pearl. Legend has it that the lake used to be an auspicious pearl hewn into its sparkling shape by the Jade Dragon and the Golden Phoenix but it was later stolen by the Mother Queen of the West. When Jade Dragon and Golden Phoenix scrambled with the Mother Queen, this pearl accidentally fell onto a land that was known as Hangzhou.
This legend, which is certainly worlds apart from true history, sheds precious light on the fact that the West Lake is a treasure that the labouring people of Hangzhou have brought into shape through numerous generations of hard labour.
The mention of the Tale of the white Snake in the foregoing indicates that for those who know something about Chinese culture, the West Lake is something of a dream. Apart from its dream-like beauty, the West Lake is also associated with so many other dream-like tales, such as the well-known Butterfly Lovers, the Legends about Lord Ji, the Story about Li Huiniang, as well as legends about such famous men of letters as Ge Hong, Lin Hejing, and Wu Changshuo. Just as Yu Qiuyu, a well-known prose writer, has it, the West Lake is a ” lake that belongs to culture”. If you learn some Chinese, you will feel more deeply about West Lake.
The brief introduction may give you some idea about the saying that the West Lake has so many beautiful thing to offer that you can simply not take them all in.
Tomorrow Miracle Mandarin will introduce another famous tourist city. Please look forward to that.
