Kevin Huang | Leifeng Pagoda, and a Lake That Reset My Head (West Lake, Hangzhou)

I had spent the day in a training course, and what I needed afterwards was a horizon.

West Lake has one.

Leifeng Pagoda (雷峰塔) stands on Sunset Hill at the lake's southern shore, and the climb pays for itself at the top.

The whole lake opens out below, the causeways drawn across it in straight lines, the hills folding away behind.

After a day in a room with a screen, standing in front of something that large did the thing only scale can do.

The tower has a story underneath it, literally.

The original went up in 977 under the Wuyue kingdom, decayed for centuries, and finally collapsed in 1924.

What you climb today was finished in 2002, built directly over the excavated ruins of the old one.

You can descend beneath the new structure and see the original base preserved in place, which is a stranger experience than it sounds: a building standing on the corpse of itself.

In folklore this is the pagoda from the Legend of the White Snake, where the monk Fahai imprisoned Bai Suzhen.

A reconstruction does not usually carry that kind of weight. This one does, because the story stayed attached to the coordinates even after the building fell down.

That layering is what I actually took away from the visit.

A 2002 building, a tenth-century ruin, and a location in a story older than either, all resolving to the same point on a map.

I founded Metablox.co and still run it alone: the infrastructure, the writing, and the publishing pipelines that put memories like this one on the map.

The premise came out of standing in places like this. Meaning settles on a place in strata, and a pin is the only honest way to hold those layers together without flattening them into a single date.

Most of what I publish now works the same way: vanished ballparks, fabs that changed hands three times, banking halls that are shops today.

The place outlasts every use anyone puts it to, and that is the part worth recording.

Leifeng Pagoda sits at the southern end of West Lake in Hangzhou, near the southern approach to the Su Causeway. Visited 22 September 2022.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), founder of Metablox.co