The Rise of the West Lake: A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty.

• Author: Jia, Qian

The Rise of the West Lake: A Cultural Landmark in the Song Dynasty. By XIAOLIN DUAN. Seattle: UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS, 2020. Pp. xi + 247. S30.

The West Lake, near the "heavenly" Hangzhou, is the best-known scenic site on China's east coast. Yet when and how did the fame of the West Lake rise? What made it stand out among the countless natural attractions in China? When did sightseeing in the suburb become a norm in Chinese leisure life? Duan Xiaolin's book offers the overdue answers to these questions by unraveling the making of this cultural landmark in the Song dynasty. Quite a few scholarly works on places in premodern China have appeared in recent years, focusing on representations of cities or regions in literature. With greater attention to the multifaceted experience of the city than to the literary tradition, the edited volume on the urban culture of Hangzhou, Senses of the City: Perceptions of Hangzhou and Southern Song China (ed. Joseph S. C. Lam et al., 2017), shares more common grounds with Duan's effort without taking on the task of tackling the practice of site making. Also, although travel and travel writing in premodern China, especially in the Song dynasty, are popular topics in recent scholarship, sightseeing, that is, short-distance travel purely for leisure, is rarely the center of discussion.

Adopting methodology from place studies, the book treats the site as the subject of the study rather than the mere context of the research. Duan aims at and succeeds in presenting "a history of West Lake and a case study of how famous Chinese sites were created through interactions between cultural norms and the natural landscape" (pp. 3-4). Encompassing a great variety of primary materials, such as poetry, gazetteers, dynastic histories, capital journals, tales, paintings, and maps, the book can also serve as an encyclopedia of historical records of the West Lake. Despite the humble claim in the title, the scope of Duan's research far exceeds the Song and extends to all later dynasties and modern periods.

The three parts of the book address respectively how the West Lake was "experienced, represented, and perceived" (p. 19). The first part explains how the lake was transformed from a natural landscape to a sightseeing destination and public leisure zone in the outskirts of the Southern Song capital, Hangzhou. Chapter 1 shows how commercial developments changed the way the West Lake was experienced. Apart from its natural...