Khu danh lam thắng cảnh Lan Đình

The Lanting Scenic Area, known in English as the Orchid Pavilion, is a 4A-rated cultural site in the hills southwest of Shaoxing, celebrated as the location of the most influential gathering in the history of Chinese calligraphy. On the third day of the third lunar month in the year 353 CE, the Eastern Jin calligrapher Wang Xizhi invited literati friends to a purification ceremony here, and the poems composed during the gathering were collected into a single volume for which Wang himself wrote the famous "Lantingji Xu," or "Preface to the Poems Collected from the Orchid Pavilion."

The preface is regarded as the supreme masterpiece of running-script calligraphy in the Chinese tradition, and its enduring influence over more than sixteen centuries of subsequent calligraphic practice has made the Orchid Pavilion itself a site of ongoing pilgrimage for calligraphers, painters, and visitors interested in classical Chinese aesthetics. The present landscape is a careful reconstruction of the original setting, with the Orchid Pavilion, the streaming-wine winding canal where guests floated their cups in a literary game, the Goose Pond, the calligraphy stele gallery, and the memorial hall to Wang Xizhi arranged along a series of stone paths through bamboo groves and forested hillsides.

The most iconic elements of the site are tied directly to the original gathering. The winding-canal poetry game, in which cups of wine were floated downstream and guests composed poems before the cup reached them, is reenacted periodically at the site and is referenced in countless later Chinese garden designs. The Goose Pond, associated with Wang's legendary love of geese and his study of their neck movements for brush technique, remains one of the most photographed features. The stele gallery displays reproductions of the most important later copies of the Lantingji Xu, since the original preface was lost within a few centuries of its composition, and the imperial calligraphy display traces the broader afterlife of the Orchid Pavilion in Chinese art.

For international visitors, the Orchid Pavilion sits a short distance outside the old city and is best treated as a half-day trip combined with the nearby tombs of ancient Yue kings. It is the single most important destination in the Shaoxing area for travelers with an interest in Chinese calligraphy, classical literature, or the history of literati culture.