Lianhu Park （West Gate）

This guide to Lianhu Park's West Gate in Xi'an starts with a riddle: old records describe a garden of roughly eight hectares, over forty mu of it underwater, but today's lake covers less than twenty. It traces the pond to the late thirteen hundreds, when Zhu Shuang, a Ming prince sent to rule Xi'an, had engineers divert the Zao River through the city wall to fill his private garden. A seventeenth-century Qing governor once dredged the silting pond and renamed it the Pond of Setting Life Free, open only to honored guests.