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	location:Home > Hu Xue Yan's Resident at Hangzhou Downtown Tour
	Hu Xue Yan's Resident at Hangzhou Downtown Tour
	History lives in wealthy merchant's mansion When talking about the scenery in Hangzhou, what flashes into your mind? Lake, bridge or garden? The former residence of Hu Xueyan in Hangzhou, the capital city of East China's Zhejiang Province, will exactly match your imagination. The residence on Yuanbao Street, which used to be the home of Hu Xueyan, Hangzhou's wealthiest merchant in the late 1800s, was built in 1872 during the reign of Emperor Tongzhi in the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) at enormous expense. It has a total area of 7,230 square meters, similar to the size of a standard soccer field. Visitors who have an interest in Chinese architecture and gardens would find a tour of this residence particularly rewarding as this complex of more than 20 buildings displays the typical landscape style in the southern part of the Yangtze River. It took Hu three years to build the residence, and the craftsmanship shows in each of its halls, the walkways connecting them with the towers, Zhiyuan Garden, pavilions, terraces, fish ponds and intricately carved stone walls. The overt corridors and covert lanes inside the residence reflect the ingeniously conceived plot in architectural layout. And exquisite craftsmanship can be found in brick-carvings, woodcarvings, stone-carvings, lime sculptures and colored paintings decorating the interior of the mansion. When building this mansion, Hu was generous in employing the best building materials such as red sandalwood, sourwood, rosewood, ginkgo, hoop pine, Chinese beech and nanmu wood. It is said that Hu's luxurious residence went to such extremes to flaunt his wealth that the Forbidden City in Beijing could not compete with the residence in using so many expensive building materials. On the eastern side is Hu's residential section, which is made up of a few tightly arranged courtyards. Corridors and lanes are dotted with ponds, rockeries, pavilions, terraces and towers, which makes the section like a labyrinth. Highlighted by elegant terraces and pavilions, small bridges and murmuring streams as well as rockeries and caves, the attached Zhiyuan Garden has a distinctive style of traditional gardens in Hangzhou. Scenery with hills and water is the theme of the garden so that the water and space appear partly separated or partly connected. There is no better place to take in all this beautiful scenery than on the balcony in the garden. The Zhiyuan Garden also boasts the largest artificial karst cave in China. The residence was built when Hu was at the acme of his life, and after the sad downfall of Hu, the residence itself went through hard times. Born in 1823 in Hangzhou, Hu started his career in his early youth as an assistant in a private bank and later established a bank of his own with the help of friends. Because Hu helped General Zuo Zongtang put down rebellions, the imperial court of the Qing Dynasty allowed him to wear a red cap and cited him as an honorary official. He was honored with the privileges of dressing in the yellow costume of officials and riding a horse in the Forbidden City. Besides banking, he expanded his business to such trades as grains, real estate, pawn brokering, and the import and export of munitions and silk. Later, he established the famous Hu Qing Yu Tang Drugstore for traditional Chinese medicine and became the richest merchant in the region. Hu went bankruptcy in his core business - silk - in 1882 and died poor in 1885. The possession of Hu's mansion was first transferred to a high-ranking official in the Qing Dynasty and then some warlords stationed there. Later, the site was the private property of individuals, a school, opera troupe and a factory. Only 50 per cent of the original architecture remained before maintenance began in 2000, when the residence was designated as a historical relic under Hangzhou's protection plan. Today's Hu's residence is restored after great efforts by experts to reconstruct the complex as it was from various reference materials such as old photographs, early written records and archaeological materials of ruins.
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