Letter From China: Rediscoveries made through trips to Zhejiang's West Lake, cultural sites

by Xinhua writer Peng Songhan

HANGZHOU, Oct. 10 (Xinhua) -- After a seven-month stay in Hangzhou, east China's Zhejiang Province, its famous West Lake holds no surprises for me.

Yet on an early autumn morning, the lake refused to be ordinary -- on the wooden bench beside me sat Rogers.

From Sept. 22 to 29, 11 scholars and journalists from Malaysia, Indonesia, Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar joined their Chinese peers to engage in field visits and exchanges, experiencing firsthand how technologies are being applied to improve local people's livelihoods and advance human rights in practice.

Among them was Roy Anthony Rogers, director of the Department of Strategic and International Studies at Universiti Malaya in Malaysia.

A father of three, Rogers is turning 50 this December. Since his first visit to China in 1995, he has returned several times. But this time, three decades after his first visit, he came not as a professor but as an explorer.

One of the group's destinations was West Lake, which is one of China's most celebrated cultural landmarks, its beauty having been enshrined in poetry and its mist-shrouded waters whispering legends of love.

As the boat drifted across the lake, Rogers glanced at the water. "West Lake is managed remarkably well," he said. "Looking at this, I'm reminded of my hometown."

Not far from his home in Malaysia is Pahang, home to Lake Chini, the country's second-largest freshwater lake. Once celebrated for its lotus blossoms and its role as a refuge for endangered species, it later suffered serious damage from over-mining and logging, Rogers told me.

"By the late 1990s," Rogers recalled, "the water was clouded, the lotus gone, hills bare, fish inedible, even traditional medicines lost to the local Jakun people."

His words triggered a memory of mine. West Lake, too, had nearly shared a similar fate. Surrounded on three sides by hills, it has long collected silt and organic matter that threaten to choke its waters.

Without dredging, restoration and vigilance, it might have become a swamp long ago. But I was proud to explain to Rogers that human hands pulled the lake back from suffocation.

Three major dredging projects undertaken after the founding of the People's Republic of China kept West Lake alive and made it a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Today, the dredging of West Lake is no longer a typical dig, load and dump process. Instead, it has evolved into a sophisticated system that combines environmental equipment, intelligent monitoring, resource recycling and ecological modeling.

Rogers nodded at my comparison. "The governance here is successful," he said. "It gives me hope, because my own country is now halting mining, launching restoration. Maybe it isn't too late."

As our bus stopped at the archaeological ruins of Liangzhu, which is now also a UNESCO World Heritage site, Rogers stepped off first, his eyes scanning the ancient earthworks with quiet curiosity.

Stepping into the site's museum, we were surrounded by countless artifacts. The moment we placed augmented reality (AR) headsets over our eyes, the world around us shifted. Digital annotations floated beside each object, explaining their pattern, material and history in clear English.

We later came to the virtual reality (VR) entertainment zone. As soon as our equipment was on, we stepped into a time tunnel, retracing the rise of Liangzhu society.

A testament to the existence of the Chinese civilization at least 5,000 years ago, wooden houses, fields of millet and villagers going about their daily lives in Liangzhu appeared around us, vivid and immediate. Every gesture, every movement felt alive.

"China is using technology not just to preserve history, but to teach it. VR and AI make culture tangible, and the multilingual audio guides let visitors hear everything in their own language," Rogers said to me with excitement.

"It's education and heritage brought alive -- and it's drawing people from all over the world," he added.

This journey, which I had thought would be just a return to familiar places for me, unexpectedly allowed me to experience the tangible efforts and extraordinary achievements behind the country's environmental governance and technological development. I must admit that the trip with my foreign friends filled me, a local reporter, with both pride and emotion. ■