Zhongshan Park （Southeast Gate）

This guide to Zhongshan Park's Southeast Gate in Hangzhou begins in the autumn of 1904, when four broke, obsessive young seal carvers, Ding Fuzhi, Wang Fu'an, Ye Weiming and Wu Yin, sat on a hillside rock and pledged to save the dying craft of seal carving, naming their new society Xiling after the bridge below. It traces the hill's earlier life as an imperial retreat for the emperors Kangxi and Qianlong, later a temple whose grand halls were already crumbling by the time the four carvers arrived. In 1913 the aging painter Wu Changshuo climbed up to see the young society's collection, at nearly seventy years old, before agreeing to become its first president.