Contact Admin. Hangzhou as an urban area, on the other hand, was established approximately 2, years ago. To any educated Chinese, Hangzhou is still a byword for the elegance and the sophistication of a classical age. Hong Kong high school students forced to endure Chinese history taught by inept teachers often bitch about how militarily weak and emasculated the Southern Song was, and how stunted the map of China became back then after the gloriously expansive Tang Dynasty.
Speakeasies, bars, ginormous mega-restaurants and nightclubs, any kind of service or entertainment you could imagine sprang up along the West Lake. All the famous classical ci poetry, lyrics of ballads sung by singsong girls and courtesans, came from this era. And this was where paper money was first issued. Hangzhou was so hot that Marco Polo still raved about it during the Yuan Dynasty when the Mongols took over a few hundred years after its heyday.
Fortunately for the Italian traveller, the northern nomads wisely left the Chinese city and its infrastructure alone. I had taken an RMB11 cab ride to Baochu Road named after an ancient pagoda close by and arrived at this insane entertainment complex — all gaudy glitz, chandeliers and neon.
Why is that dude so popular? His ditties are absolutely inane. The clubbers were all brunettes dressed like Taiwanese pop stars.
They were all very curious about my faded denim field cap, shiny matte black shirt underneath an oversized denim shirt, aubergine skinny jeans and black sequined FitFlops.
