Ouyang Xiu, Su Shi and Yingzhou West Lake

Yingzhou is the former name associated with today’s Fuyang, and its West Lake belongs to a literary map that is easy to overlook beside the better-known lake in Hangzhou. The Fuyang Museum keeps that older landscape in view with a model showing West Lake Academy, Liuyi Hall and Su Causeway. These are not a surviving panorama to be mistaken for an intact medieval site; they are the pieces through which the museum reconstructs a place once tied to officials, poems and civic memory.

Ouyang Xiu’s connection to Yingzhou was more than a short posting. The museum account says he retired beside the lake and used the name Liuyi Jushi, the “Old Man of Six Ones.” The name condensed a scholar’s household into a deliberately modest inventory: books, collected inscriptions, a qin, a chess game, a pot of wine and the old man himself. A lakeside retreat became a way to describe a life organized around reading, music, conversation and writing after public office.

In 1071, as Su Shi was traveling to take up a post in Hangzhou, he made a detour to Yingzhou to visit Ouyang Xiu. The Fuyang Museum presents the meeting with Su Shi’s brother Su Zhe also there: three writers gathered at Liuyi Hall, talking poetry and prose. The episode belongs to the history of mentorship as much as to the lake. Su Shi’s journey was not simply a stop at a scenic waterline; it was a return to a teacher whose approval had helped shape his literary career.

Su Shi’s line “I have not decided whether Hangzhou or Yingzhou is the greater” made comparison itself part of the lake’s afterlife. It does not need to be read as a modern ranking. In the museum’s retelling, the verse gives Yingzhou a place in a wider cultural conversation, while the model’s academy, hall and embankment restore a local setting around the names. The landscape now survives through fragments, reconstruction and literature; reading them together lets the old lake remain a particular place in Fuyang rather than a copy of Hangzhou.