Shaoxing

About Shaoxing

Laced with canals and crossed by countless stone bridges, Shaoxing is a water town on a grand scale, with a memory that runs back more than 2,500 years to the days when it was the capital of the ancient state of Yue. Its streets have produced poets, calligraphers, scholars and revolutionaries ever since, and many of their homes still stand.

The writer Lu Xun was born here, and his childhood home and schoolroom are the city's best-loved sights; the revolutionary Qiu Jin and the family of Zhou Enlai also came from Shaoxing. Just outside town, the calligrapher Wang Xizhi held his famous gathering at the Orchid Pavilion in 353, and Yu the Great, tamer of floods, is honoured at a grand mausoleum.

Shaoxing is also home to China's most famous rice wine, aged in earthenware jars and drunk warm with fennel beans and pungent stinky tofu. Black-awning boats, rowed with the feet, still glide along the canals. High-speed trains reach Hangzhou in under half an hour and Shanghai in about an hour and a half.