Shili Langdang （Northeast Gate）

About this audio guide

This guide to Shili Langdang, the northeast gate ridge above Hangzhou, starts with a sound: the metallic clink of a Tang-dynasty peddler's swaying load, said to give the ridge its name, roughly ten li of pure clatter. You'll hear how the same stone path doubled as a pilgrim's road linking Lingyin Temple to Yunqi Temple, and how a Wuyue king ordered an imperial road built along it. The guide follows the ridge through the Ming and Qing paving of the Yunqi Bamboo Path, the ruined Zhenji Temple, an eleventh-century cliff inscription and a fourteen-hundred-year-old ginkgo tree. Walk it slowly, the way traders and monks once did.