Other
Zhouzhuang
Chinese name
周庄古镇
Opening hours: 08:00 - 21:00
Take a look around at the black-tiled roofs, the stone arched bridges, and the canals running right where roads would normally be. People call Zhouzhuang China's Number One Water Town. It has been settled for over nine hundred years, and its core layout has barely changed since the late Ming dynasty.
Yet this is the town that taught modern China how to sell nostalgia, and the whole boom was set in motion by a single painting. In 1984, the painter Chen Yifei exhibited a piece in New York called Memories of My Hometown, showing a quiet canal at dawn with a lone boatman. The American businessman Armand Hammer bought it and presented it as a gift to Deng Xiaoping.
That painting depicted Shuangqiao, the Double Bridge right here in town, and it launched Zhouzhuang from an unknown corner of Jiangnan into national fame almost overnight. By 1989, the town had built the first tourist centre of any water town in China.