Hangzhou Private 2-Day Tour from Shanghai with Lingyin Temple

Your tour leader will meet you at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station and then we will take a bullet train to Hangzhou. After lunch, we will visit a new museum in Hangzhou - Liangzhu Museum. Liangzhu museum was designed by David Chipperfield who is world-class but low-profiled. It is slightly out of town so you can get relaxation from the city bustle. The museum houses a collection of archaeological findings from the Liangzhu culture, also known as the Jade culture. Composed of four bar-formed volumes made of Iranian travertine stone, the building is set on a lake and connected via bridges to the park. The sculptural quality of the building ensemble reveals itself gradually as the visitor approaches the museum.

After visiting Liangzhu Museum, we will head over to a wetland park. This huge wetland park offers an alternative experience away from the crowd and back to nature. It is a beautiful park to enjoy the scenery of nature, full of water and greenery. You can see life in an ancient village, history of silkworm feeding and silk production. We will take a boat and you can save more time and energy for the nature scenery.

Today's Hangzhou tour we will start from Lingyin Temple. Lingyin Temple is Hangzhou’s most famous Buddhist temple. It was originally built in AD 326, but has been destroyed and rebuilt no fewer than 16 times. During the Five Dynasties period (907–960) about 3000 monks lived here. The Hall of the Four Heavenly Kings is astonishing, with its four vast guardians and an ornate cabinet housing Milefo (the future Buddha). The Great Hall contains a magnificent 20m-high statue of Siddhartha Gautama (Sakyamuni), sculpted from 24 blocks of camphor wood in 1956 and based on a Tang dynasty original.

The walk up to the Lingyin temple skirts the flanks of Fei Lai Feng (飞来峰), magically transported here from India according to legend. The Buddhist carvings (all 470 of them) lining the riverbanks and hillsides and tucked away inside grottoes date from the 10th to 14th centuries and are as appealing as Lingyin Temple itself. To get a close-up view of the best carvings, including the famed ‘laughing’ Maitreya Buddha, follow the paths along the far (eastern) side of the stream.

This will your last stop of this tour. Meijiawu Tea Village is in the foothills of the West Lake district. There are some tea plantations with a long history of 100's years. The hills, valleys (everywhere) are planted with tea, nice landscaped villages. It is lovely to see the tea bushes rolling up the hillsides and see the tea pickers at work. The air in the village is crystal clear and wonderfully fresh after the city smog. It's so serene and beautiful here once you can hike far enough into the fields.