Travel Guide Shaoxing 绍兴

Located 67 km south-east of Hangzhou on the Hangzhou-Ningbo railway line, the city has a history of over 2 500 years, the capital of the kingdom of Yue.From this important time, Shaoxing retained many legacies and traditions. The city is interconnected by a network of channels as large as the road network.The city is discovered by navigating the canals on board the famous black-winged boats (4 m long, covered with a spherical vélum whose structure is bamboo). The canal also runs back to the rear of the houses producing a weft of identical dwellings, row after row. The Bazi Qiao bridge (八字侨) - ba means «eight» in Chinese and the character reproduces exactly the shape of the bridge - built under the Song (960-1279) is the most famous of some 5 000 bridges that cross the canals of Shaoxing, formerly known as «Land of bridges». Along Nanjie, in the south-east of the city, you visit the garden Shenyuan made famous by the poet Song Lu You (1125-1210): a universe of water, rockeries, bridges and greenery.500 metres west, take Lu Xun Lu, on which the home of the famous contemporary writer Lu Xun (1881-1936) and the Sanwai school («Three Flavours» in Chinese) is located.The family house of Lu Xun (鲁迅故) is a former bourgeois residence of the region built in the th century: . In front of you is a spirits shop (Xianheng) of the region dating back to 1890, characterized by an ancient decor, wooden counters and terracotta containers. Shaoxing is known for its rice wine or yellow wine (Huangjiu) preserved in large terracotta jars.Then taking Jiefang Lu, we lead to the roundabout Xuantingkou on which a monument to Qin Jin's Memory (1879-1907) is erected, a martyr of the anti-imperialist insurrection of 1907, directed against the Qing Dynasty.