The Ancestral Hall of Gentlemen Bai and Su
By admin on 2015-01-08

Hangzhou's iconic West Lake owes its beauty and causeways to the administration of two early poet governors, Bai and Su, who are being celebrated in a newly restored memorial, Xu Wenwen reports.

As the Hangzhou idiom says, "West Lake started with Bai and flourished with Su," a tribute to two important supporters of the iconic tourist destination.

The scenic lake's long reputation has been enhanced by hundreds of Hangzhou governors, but two of the most important were Bai Juyi (AD 772-846) and Su Dongpo (1037-1101), also famous poets in Chinese history.

Both of them dredged the lake, banked up causeways, improved the lake's environment and enabled local people to live in peace. Bai confirmed West Lake (Xi Hu) as the lake's official name and Su enhanced its reputation through his poems.

At the north of West Lake, next to the provincial museum, the Ancestral Hall of Gentlemen Bai and Su (Bai Su Er Gong Ci 白苏二公祠) is a monument to the two great leaders.

Bai came to Hangzhou as a governor from AD 822 to 824. Su came twice as an official lawyer and later a governor, staying about five years in total.

Each man is highly respected by today's Hangzhou residents as respectable governors of ancient China. As early as the Song Period (AD 420-479) of the Southern Dynasty (AD 420-589), Hangzhou officials and local celebrities had set up ancestral halls and statues of the two great figures beside West Lake.

As time passed, the buildings and statues were damaged by fire, renovated, destroyed during war, and again renovated. In 1866, local squire Ding Bing combined the two separate but adjacent halls into one, located near the Park of Moon over the Peaceful Lake in Autumn (Ping Hu Qiu Yue).

The hall was used as an art college dormitory in the early 20th century and gradually turned into a folk house but became dilapidated toward the end of the 20th century.

In 1994, a large number of unsafe houses near the lake were torn down in a city reclamation. Inscribed stone tablets embedded in the hall's wall were found and revealed its historical significance so the local government rebuilt it in 2005.

Thanks to long-ago residents who protected the inscriptions by whitewashing the walls, these cultural relics were well preserved in times of turbulence and, as the characters remained legible, it was possible to learn the original cost of building the hall.

When Bai left his post in Hangzhou, he only took two stones and a crane, and donated a majority of his salary (most ancient Chinese officials received salary annually) to the local treasury to start a fund for dredging West Lake.

Bai's action was imitated by some successors and outgoing officials donating money to treasury became an unwritten rule that lasted about 50 years.

Bai's affection for West Lake can been seen in the collection of 3,600 poems he wrote during his lifetime, among which more than 200 of them praise West Lake, though he only stayed in Hangzhou for 20 months.

West Lake 1,000 years ago was not the peaceful scenery spot it has become today, suffering then from drought and flood.

Bai realized the farmland nearby depended on water from the lake, but due to the negligence of former administrations, the old dyke had collapsed, the water level dropped, and local farmers suffered from severe drought.

He ordered the construction of a stronger and higher dyke, with a dam to control the flow of water, and thus solved the drought problem. The livelihood of Hangzhou people subsequently improved.

As a result Bai had more leisure time to enjoy the beauty of West Lake. He ordered the construction of a causeway connecting the Broken Bridge (Duan Qiao) with the Solitary Hill (Gu Shan) to facilitate walking instead of depending on boats.

Bai's improvements exceeded his expectations. The long causeway transformed the look of the lake - less flooding reduced the impact of rough waves and made them gentler, enabling West Lake's now graceful features to start forming.

Bai also dredged the lake and the city's main six wells so that drinking water quality was improved. And as farms could be irrigated by lake water, many local dwellers move to live near the lake, thus transforming the city's layout.

Though the dam Bai instructed to be built disappeared long ago, local people named the old Baisha Causeway as Bai Causeway (Bai Di) in honor of his involvement.

To some extent, Su Dongpo imitated Bai when he took charge of the city over 200 years later.

Su was a writer, poet, artist, calligrapher, pharmacologist and statesman of the Song Dynasty, and one of the major poets of that era.

For 20 years from 1060, Su held a variety of government positions throughout China, most notably in Hangzhou where he was responsible for constructing a pedestrian causeway across West Lake that still bears his name, Su Causeway (Su Di).

At that time, farmers were suffering from another drought, and the lake's water surface area was down. Overgrown weeds at the bottom of the lake clogged the irrigation ducts.

Su ordered a large-scale dredging of the lake and piled all the mud into another causeway in the style of Baisha Causeway, but it was much wider and nearly three times as long. He also planted trees and flowers along its banks, adding more beauty to the lake.

The dredging project employed thousands of soldiers and farm workers and took more than six months. This causeway was later named after him. There are six bridges along the 2.6-kilometer Su Causeway, and the Dawn on the Su Causeway in Spring (Su Di Chun Xiao) is still one of the top 10 attractions of Hangzhou.

Not long after this project finished there was a national famine and Su again exerted his authority.

He stabilized Hangzhou's rice price, raised financial help from everywhere, asked the government to reduce tax, and he stored rice to sell cheaply later when the prices rose.

Su also anticipated a future epidemic so he called on the city's wealthy to contribute funds to set up the first public hospital in Hangzhou to treat poor people.

Many folk tales about Su are told by Hangzhou people, and the one about Dongpo's Pork (Dongpo rou) is popular.

It is said that Hangzhou people once thanked Su by sending him pork and wine. Su asked them to stew the pork and send it with the wine to thank the workers dredging the lake. People misheard his instructions and cooked the pork in the wine before sending it to the workers.

Pork stewed this way is very fragrant and the workers called it Dongpo Pork in honor of Su. The governor's pseudonym was Dongpo Jushi (The Scholar in Retirement at Eastern Slope).

Last month, the municipal government finished its renovation work and the restored building is 1,386 square meters, with two halls, two wings and one stone tablets corridor. Four rooms are devoted to the life stories of Bai and Su and their poems about West Lake and Hangzhou.

The hall has an ancient look and the horizontal inscribed board and couplet hanging on its columns are written by top-class Hangzhou calligraphers.