Wenlan Pavilion
Rebuilt garden library housing a rare surviving copy of an imperial Qing-era encyclopedia.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to Wenlan Pavilion on West Lake in Hangzhou traces the fate of the Siku Quanshu, the Qianlong Emperor's 1782 encyclopedia project that took hundreds of scholars and thousands of scribes years to copy by hand into more than thirty-six thousand volumes. It follows what happened when Taiping rebels sacked Hangzhou in 1861 and gutted the pavilion holding the only complete copy south of Beijing. You'll hear about the book collector named Ding who spent years afterward chasing down whatever survived. Look closely at the rebuilt hall's shelves.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Gushan Park
Hillside garden holding an imperial library rebuilt page by page after Qing-era looters scattered its books.
Wuzhen Scenic Area
Water town whose lakeside museum holds the smuggled prison notebooks of a Cultural Revolution-era painter and writer.
中国丝绸博物馆
Textile conservation lab and gallery reassembling centuries-old imperial silk garments thread by thread.
Jingci Temple
Bell tower housing a ten-ton bronze bell cast with sixty-eight thousand sutra characters.
Hangzhou Confucian Temple
Wooden temple hall and stone stele garden where students still undergo age-old rites of passage.
China Grand Canal Museum
Riverside halls of barges, bridges, and relics tracing a waterway that shaped an empire's grain trade.