Why does everyone say that Hangzhou has changed its flavor?

Why does everyone say that Hangzhou has changed its flavor?

The ambiguity of Hangzhou’s urban personality may have started when foreign cuisine conquered the base camp of Hangzhou cuisine.

Half a year ago, the Cantonese restaurant with the “time-honored” name opened to the side of the West Lake, attracting a long queue of the Hangzhou People’s Congress. One or two hours was just a routine operation. Some people came to pick up the number after lunch and finally settled down at dinner time. Hangzhou The people’s enthusiasm for Guangdong morning tea is evident.

△1818 Golden Eye reports the grand queue of Cantonese restaurants in Hangzhou / Weibo

In Guangdong, where there are gluttons and teahouses everywhere, people have always been ambiguous about Diandude. It is such a chain store that is so sought after, and Hangzhou’s reputation as a “food desert” seems to have taken off once again.

Of course, Hangzhou people have to argue, but looking around, the base area of ​​Hangbang cuisine seems to be shrinking. After the expansion of Green Tea, Xinbailu, and Grandma’s family, they gradually lose their individuality. They cannot stop pickled cabbage fish, Sichuan-Chongqing hot pot, and grilled fish. Siege of the city.

△Hangzhou’s personality is getting blurred? / Lu Xiu Telephoto

Food may be just a microcosm, The dialects, customs, and regional identities belonging to Hangzhou are becoming blurred with the continuous expansion of the city boundary , This may be the fate of all fast-developing cities.

In 2020, Hangzhou will newly recruit more than 400,000 college students under the age of 35, and the total number of new settlers is expected to be close to 600,000. The old Hangzhou people who live by the West Lake, the Xiaoshan people and Yuhang people who consciously draw a clear line from the old Hangzhou, and the new Hangzhou people who have rushed to settle down from thousands of miles, standing on the edge of the Qiantang River, which is endless day and night, will inevitably have to face the same The problem:

Where is Hangzhou? Who is from Hangzhou? What is Hangzhou flavor?

Imagined Hangzhou

“There is heaven on the top, Suzhou and Hangzhou on the bottom”, this is a sentence everyone has been tired of since childhood. The two cities of Suzhou and Hangzhou carry most of the imagination about Jiangnan—— Gentle, beautiful, softly speaking, hazy water vapor. Especially the shallow West Lake in that bay, “light makeup is always suitable”, and every wave of water is folded with thousands of styles.

As Yu Qiuyu wrote about a swimming experience in the West Lake: “The lake is not cool, the bottom of the lake is not deep, but the soft and velvety ground cannot be kicked, reminding people that there are thousands of years of siltation here. When I came ashore, I thought that I was from the Song Dynasty. I went into the water at the precincts and ended up swimming to the relic of a Qing man. Therefore, the water wave that was just fondled was immediately abstracted by history, and it was almost unreal.”

△The residual lotus by the Jixian Pavilion. / unsplash@Max van den Oetelaar

The history of Hangzhou is too long, and there are too many cultural symbols deposited in the West Lake , Even if you haven’t been here for a while, there are countless opportunities to meet it. The broken bridge where Xu Xianchu met the White Lady, the collapsed and restored Leifeng Pagoda, the Wansong Academy where Liang Shanbo and Zhu Yingtai studied… Repeated reading in textbooks, high appearance rates in film and television dramas, and family and friends travel The tea leaves, silk scarves, and folding fans that roughly depict the scenery of the West Lake all weave the Chinese imagination of Hangzhou early.

Those who are familiar with traditional culture will not get lost even if they visit the West Lake for the first time.

Among the tireless chants of literati in the past, the most memorable one is Liu Yong’s “Wang Hai Tide”.Among the poems in this preferred Chinese textbook, Hangzhou’s City status It is “Southeast Xingsheng, Sanwu City, Qiantang Prosperous since ancient times”, Hangzhou Cityscape It is “clouds and trees around the embankment and sand, raging waves and frost and snow, and the sky is boundless.” The life of Hangzhou citizens is “listening to the flute and drums while drunk, singing and appreciating the haze”, from Hangzhou. The level of development It is “the city’s jewels, the household is surplus, and the luxury is competing.”

△Wu Mountain is not high, but it happens to overlook the West Lake. / Picture Worm Creative

Even the Emperor of the Jin Kingdom, Wan Yanliang, who was a thousand years ago, couldn’t help standing up for it. “Raise one million soldiers on the West Lake, immediately the first peak of Wushan Mountain” It’s no wonder that generations of Chinese children close their textbooks, walk out of the classroom, and begin to imagine this beautiful city far away in their hearts.

However, the city of Hangzhou in reality does not always respond to this imagination, in other words, Hangzhou has never been exactly what people imagined.

Tourists flock to Baidi Sudi day after day to admire the expected Jiangnan scenery, but they As long as you walk a few more steps, you can detect another kind of temperament in this city. ——At the end of Sudi, passing through the hustle and bustle of people, in front of you is the famous Yuemiao, turning to the east of Yuemiao, a few steps away, is the small tomb of Su’s “grass like green, pine like cover” written by Li He. Not far away, the tomb of Jianhu heroine Qiu Jin lives next to each other.

△In summer, the lotus leaves next to Jixian Pavilion. / unsplash@Kevin Gu

A wild poet, a tragic talented woman, a dazzling hero , Living together wonderfully here, Yuan Mei of the Qing Dynasty wrote, “Lying with Yue and Shuang Shaobao, the world begins to feel heavy on the West Lake.” Hangzhou certainly has a beautiful side, but On the back of the delicate atmosphere, there is the vigorous and heroic spirit of Hangzhou.

In turbulent times, this heroic spirit gave birth to heroism. Today, it provides inexhaustible impetus for the rise of cities.

The appearance is delicate, the bone is heroic

If northerners are lucky enough to eat a bowl of Pian’erchuan in Hangzhou, they will definitely feel cordial. It is also a famous Jiangnan noodle. Compared with the exquisiteness of Ouzao noodles and the lightness of Yangchun noodles, the salty fragrance of Pian’erchuan may be genetically closer to that of the north. The Erhuayin in the name is also easy to stump the Jiangnan villagers. Only the bamboo shoots and snow vegetables floating in the bottom of the soup show its identity as a mixed race of north and south.

This mixed element does not only appear in the diet. To describe it in today’s parlance, Hangzhou has been a very tolerant city since ancient times.

△Pianerchuan, one of Hangzhou’s representative foods. / Picture Worm Creative

Hangzhou’s mind is always open During the Anshi Rebellion, the Tang Dynasty turned from prosperity to decline, tea saint Lu Yu came to Hangzhou to take refuge, writing “there is Jiamu in the south, and people are among the grass and trees”. At the end of the Tang Dynasty, the warlords fought in a melee, and the Wu Yueguo of Qianlong kept one side safe. “The southeast is always the Jin Tianzhu, who envied the tens of thousands of households at that time.” In the troubled times, the peaceful Hangzhou is especially precious.

The changes in Jingkang, the Southern and Northern Song Dynasties, changed the capital city from Kaifeng on the Yellow River to Hangzhou on the Qiantang River. A large number of northerners flocked to Hangzhou Among them were the first-class painter Li Tang at the time, the famous poet Chen Yuyi, and countless traffickers and commoners. From Jianyan to Shaoxing, in the 30 years when the situation in the Southern Song Dynasty gradually stabilized, the number of immigrants has exceeded that of local residents in Hangzhou. The mark left by this historical process today is the Hangzhou dialect, which is clearly different from Wu Nong’s soft language.

△I was fortunate to have seen the West Lake after snow once. / Lu Xiu Telephoto

The phrase “only Hangzhou as Bianzhou” has made many people mistakenly believe that Hangzhou’s soft mi has been a heroic spirit. In fact, it is precisely this beautiful landscape, At the same time accommodates the delicate and heroic , The tiger sniffs the rose, no matter how stubborn people are, they can’t help showing their soft side here.

The king of Wuyue Qianyu once left the legend of Qian Wang shooting the tide, and there is still a sculpture of the same name by the Qiantang River: Qianyu leaping on a horse with a whip, facing the raging tide of the world, ordering soldiers to aim at the head and send all arrows. Faced with such a momentum, the Pentium Qianjiang tide seemed to be a real stop.

It’s such an indomitable Qian Wei. When he missed his wife returning home, Zhanxin wrote the famous gentle sentence “Flowers on the Moshang, you can return slowly.” This poetry lasted for thousands of years, and it is still a golden sentence circulating on the Internet.

△The “Qianwang shoots the tide” by the Qiantang River. / Picture Worm Creative

As a native of Hangzhou, Yu Qian, a national hero who turned the tide in the Ming Dynasty, came to the West Lake and chanted naturally: “The willows outside the Jinmen are like smoke, the water of the West Lake beats the sky. The jade wrists and skirts are paired with oars, and the mandarin ducks fly close to the sky. Lotus boat.”

If you want to see the gentle and elegant Jiangnan scenery, Hangzhou will not let you down. But if you think that weakness is the urban character of Hangzhou, it is really a big misunderstanding.

According to the meticulous “Old Wu Lin”, even in the face of the “shocking lasing shot, swallowing sky and fertile day” Qiantang tide, Hangzhou teenagers “struggled to brave the first, greet them, and haunt the waves of whales.”Just think about the magnificence of this scene, who can say that this is a “The warm wind makes tourists drunk” Where is Hangzhou?

From Little Hangzhou to Greater Hangzhou

In the sitcom “I Love My Home” broadcast in 1994, there was a plot: Husband Jia Zhiguo returned from a business trip in Hangzhou, and his wife peacefully said that he was “resting in Jiangnan water town for half a month”. Travel and leisure are the most prominent in this city. s Mark.

At that time, Hangzhou was still a “little man” in the capital city of the country. It seemed that there was still a long distance from the side of West Lake to Old Yuhang. The economy of Xiaoshan on the opposite bank of the Qiantang River took off, and many people did not regard themselves as Hangzhou people. Don’t talk about the distant Fuyang, Jiande, and Chun’an.

In the urban structure of Shanghai, Nanjing and Hangzhou, Hangzhou is at the bottom. In the tide of reform and opening up, The name of Hangzhou was not as eye-catching as neighboring Wenzhou, Ningbo, and Yiwu.

△ Hangzhou used to be far less crowded than it is now. / Picture Worm Creative

But in this peace, new changes are already brewing.

In 1998, Wahaha, founded by Hangzhou native Zong Qinghou, embarked on the fast track of development. The new product is very cola. “The Chinese’s Own Coke” , Popular across the country. In addition to silk and tea, beverages, automobiles, and industrial products from Hangzhou have also quietly changed the lives of Chinese people.

In the same year that Very Cola was born, Hangzhou girl Tang Wei began to pursue her dream of being an actress. She was preparing for the performance department of the Central Academy of Drama for two consecutive years, but she failed. In one of the failures, the examiner gave the reason that “the appearance is not special and he is not suitable for being an actor”.

Tang Wei didn’t give up. For the third time, she decided to change her direction and apply for the directing department, and finally got the opportunity to study in Chinese opera. Among the 15 students in the Directing Department of that year, Tang Wei left everyone with the impression that he was “the most beautiful one.”

In the last two years of the last century, few people in Hangzhou had heard the name of Alibaba. In March 1999, “Zhejiang Hangzhou guy” Ma Yun officially resigned from public office and raised enough RMB 500,000 to start a new round of entrepreneurship. He assembled the initial team later known as the Eighteen Arhats to develop the Alibaba website.

△Across the Qiantang River, overlooking a new Hangzhou. / unsplash@seele an

People often sigh with emotion, The changes in Hangzhou in the last two decades may be greater than in the past two hundred years : West Lake dared to be the first in the world, becoming the country’s first free and open top scenic spot, attracting tourists from all directions; the riverside segmented from Xiaoshan, Yuhang, the base camp of Alibaba, one south and one north, pull the city into the express train of the Internet economy; from From Huang Zheng to Zhong Yanyan, wealth replaced the beauty and became the most famous symbol of Hangzhou. The city’s borders continue to expand. According to the administrative division, Qiandao Lake, which is more than 100 kilometers away and two hours away by car, has also been included in the category of Hangzhou.

People are often confused as to why Hangzhou has no special features. The old Hangzhou people are increasingly unable to hear the authentic Hangzhou accent. The new Hangzhou people have a longing for life in the south of the Yangtze River, but they are trapped in their nine-to-nine life.

The G20 summit and the Asian Games are coming one after another. Hangzhou is rushing towards the goal of first-tier cities, but the housing prices are getting higher and higher, and the queues on the Qiushi Elevated Road are getting longer and longer. someone said, In this old city, we can smell Shenzhen more and more.

△Hangzhou is becoming a city of internet celebrities. On the streets of Hangzhou, a model is “street shooting”. /Picture Worm Creative

But think about it the other way around, how many Shenzhen-style emerging cities, where the center of the city can accommodate a beautiful landscape of West Lake? How many ancient Hangzhou-style cities can stay behind in the ever-changing development?Of course Hangzhou is not perfect, nor can it become what everyone wants, but This inclusive measure of both delicate and heroic, classic and modern, busy and quiet, secular and elegant, efficiency and leisure , It is precisely Hangzhou’s everlasting urban temperament.

Everyone has their own answers to what Hangzhou taste is. A city that can withstand praise and complains will naturally not lose its urban character easily.

Whether settled or traveling, people who come to Hangzhou and go around always meet by the West Lake, as the soul of the city, The rippling West Lake is always more open than we thought.

Do you have any impression of Hangzhou?

Cao Jili

Edit | Second Uncle

Typography | Gloria

The picture in the article comes from the Internet

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