When the river is a street

Look at a house beside a canal and the familiar idea of a front door becomes less certain. One side faces a lane; another meets the water. Steps descend towards a boat, while an upper room looks across to the opposite bank. In the water towns around Jiaxing, these small arrangements make a whole landscape intelligible. Water was part of how people carried things, met one another and placed their buildings. The view begins to look like a working plan for a town.

Jiaxing lies on the low plain of northern Zhejiang, between Shanghai and Hangzhou. Its name describes both the city and a wider municipal area: Wuzhen is in Tongxiang, and Xitang is in Jiashan. They are distinct towns, rather than two streets in central Jiaxing. In the city itself, the Grand Canal and connecting waterways help explain the older urban pattern. Yuehe, or Moon River, offers a smaller stretch of that canal-side world; South Lake opens the view out again.

At Wuzhen, look for rooms and timber edges close to the channel, then follow the story into a dyeing courtyard. In Xitang, the covered riverside walkways draw attention to another problem: how to keep a street usable through sun and rain. A bridge joins these narrow worlds without filling in the water between them. These are useful differences to carry from one place to the next. Jiaxing becomes more than a collection of similar canal photographs when you begin to notice the little inventions along its banks.