Dongzha (Wuzhen East Gate)

The East Scenic Zone is the older and more lived-in of Wuzhen's two main scenic areas, preserving a working section of the original water town rather than the redesigned, more curated landscape of the West Zone. It is also the zone most associated with the well-known Chinese television drama 似水年华, which was filmed along its lanes and brought the district's quiet canal-side architecture to a wide audience across China.

The zone's character is shaped by the fact that local residents still live in many of the old houses that line the canals. Walking through, visitors pass timber-framed facades with their original wooden doors and black-tiled roofs, drying laundry hung out over narrow lanes, and the daily rhythms of a town that has not been fully converted into a museum piece. This gives the East Zone a more authentic, if less photogenic, atmosphere than the West Zone, with the lanes feeling closer to how Wuzhen actually looked and functioned for most of its history.

Several of the East Zone's key landmarks tie directly into the town's cultural history. The former residence of Mao Dun, the celebrated modern Chinese novelist and Wuzhen native, is preserved as a museum and is one of the most important single sites in the zone, giving visitors a window into the literary and intellectual life that emerged from the town. Nearby stand the Xiuzhen Daoist Temple, traditional workshops demonstrating indigo dyeing and woodblock printing, and a network of small museums and historic residences spread along the canals.

A traditional wooden awning boat ride along the canals is one of the signature experiences here, giving visitors a water-level view of the lanes, bridges, and back doors of the houses that line the water. A relaxed visit takes two to three hours, and many visitors pair a morning in the East Zone with an afternoon and evening in the West Zone, using the contrast between the two areas to see both the working and curated faces of the same water town. Because the East Zone has a quieter evening atmosphere than the West Zone, it tends to be more of a daytime destination, with most visitors moving west as the light begins to fade.