Top Ten Scenes of the West Lake-Viewing Fish at Flower Pond
This scene is located at the southwest corner of the West Lake, and is adjacent to the Su Causeway in the east and respectively to the Xiaonan Lake and Xili Lake in the south and north. There is a brook at the foot of Huajia Mountain flowing through this place into the West Lake. Because that a lot of flowers and trees are planted along the brook, petals often fall into the brook, so it is named as “Flower Harbor”. In the South Song Dynasty, chamberlain officer Lu Yunsheng ever built a cottage and a private garden at the foot of Huajia Mountain near here. In his garden, the flowers and trees are luxuriant and well-spaced. He drew water into the pool to keep colored fishes for appreciating and cultivating thoughts and feelings. This place gradually becomes one that visitors frequently come to visit in a confused or disorderly manner. It was called as Lu Garden at that time and also named as Flower Harbor for being close to the Huajia Mountain. It was listed into when the court painters created the painting series of Top Ten Scenes of the West Lake. In the thirty eighth year of Emperor Kang Xi’s reign (AD 1699), the Emperor Xuan Ye paid a royal visit to the West Lake, wrote the inscription of appreciating fishes at Flower Harbor as the name of scene and built a stone monument at the bank of the fish pool. Later, when the Emperor Qianlong went down to the southern Yangtze River area to visit the West Lake, he also inscribed poems on the north of the monument, and the poem says that: “a brook named Flower Harbor flows at the foot of Huajia Mountain, the fallen flowers touch fishes in the brook and the fishes suck the flowers”. Today’s Appreciating Fishes at Flower Harbor is a large-scale park that covers an area of more than 20 hectares.