Chapter from the book "23 Reasons to Fall in Love with Hangzhou", written by Natasa Vujicic
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If you ever find yourself at the crossroad of Zhonghe East Road (中河南路) and Wansongling Road (万松岭路), face uphill, leaving the busy elevated road behind. If you go up, you will end up in the West Lake area. If you go right, you will end up in Hefang Street (河坊街). I recommend neither.
Instead, take a few steps up the hill, turn left, and step into a different era. Walk Phoenix Shanjiao Road (凤凰山脚路) to the end, and just explore. At the end of the road you can turn right, up the hill to the Fenghuang Yuyuan Culture Creativity Base (凤凰御元艺术基地), or you can continue straight, toward Litaizu Bay (里太祖湾), and take a walk around the Mantoushan community (馒头山社区).
Mantoushan is one of those places that somehow managed to preserve the nonchalant charm of the old neighborhood, gain the eclectic vibe of the hip new places to be, and all the while manage to stay out of the main tourist routes. When I think of it, it reminds me of a traditional Chinese black-and-white painting paired with a neon sticker. The neighborhood smells like fresh croissants and coffee, clothes are hanging on ropes spread across alleys, red lanterns decorate the windows.
The first three streets to the right will take you to the very heart of the Mantoushan community. Scattered all around the area, right there in plain sight, just steps from the main road, are countless relics. You can reach one of them at the end of the second street: The Pillars of the Brahma Temple, built in 965 by the king of the Wuyue Kingdom (吴越国). The next two alleys lead to many restaurants and bars, which vary wildly in style and offering.
Somewhere along the way, you will bump into two dogs sitting on chairs while their owner stands. Close by, according to the rumors, there is a talking wren. A few steps back or forth and you will find yourself in front of the flower and dessert shop with a giraffe statue in front. If you look up, you will see bells hanging from the tree branches.
Here you will find locals fixing their bikes next door to elegant, expensive French pastry shops. You will find an authentic, local, not-renovated-in-thirty-years canteen next to the newly opened Greek bakery. You may be served by a gorgeous blue-eyed waitress who cannot speak or hear, or by a young man who fluently speaks four languages. You can have a really good Aperol Spritz followed by a tasty bowl of tangyuan (汤圆 - glutinous rice flour balls boiled or deep-fried, traditionally eaten during the Lantern Festival) And then you can window-shop past the really expensive art stores and really cheap trinket shops.
I particularly recommend browsing the restaurants in Mantoushan. Most of them have good service and good food, but are new and unknown to the general public and hence not too crowded. You should be able to get a table. If not, grab a coffee (or an aperitif) and wait for half an hour, or simply knock on the next door. Wherever you choose will be great.
I first came across this neighborhood when I dropped off a friend after a course on entrepreneurship she was teaching, and I was attending. Since we were coming from an elevated bridge, I couldn’t quite grasp my whereabouts, but once we took the exit and ended up on the surface road, it was like we had stepped 100 years back into the past. I, of course, loved it on the spot and immediately marked it as a place to return to.
It was not until few months after that I had a chance to explore it a bit with the kids and my amazing husband, who tirelessly pushed the stroller with our baby girl up and down the neighborhood. We passed Mantoushan and continued toward the Octagonal Field (八卦田), had a coffee at the small coffee shop near the ceramics market, and then entered the Southern Song Dynasty Government Kiln Museum (南宋官窑博物馆). There we stumbled upon a ceramics art center. That was the place where we discovered how artistically talented our son is. Working with the pottery wheel for the first time, at the age of eight, he sculpted a multi-tiered vase. If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I wouldn’t believe that could be done by hand, let alone by my own child.
That was an eye-opening experience for both my husband and me. With our backgrounds in IT and economics, art was not on our radar. Immediately, it hit us that all the math, language, and swimming lessons we were piling on our son’s shoulders were in vain. There, on the spot, we decided to exchange them for time he could spend playing. That led to his passion for creating and engineering—Lego bricks, video editing, music, paper crafts, you name it. A few months later he started learning the programming language Scratch by himself. Then a year later, Python. Soon he developed his first video game.
Maybe it was the uniqueness of Mantoushan and that artistic, bohemian atmosphere that somehow loosened our boundaries and ushered us to rethink the way we were raising him. Or maybe his talent was so obvious that we simply could not ignore it, even if we wanted. Either way, in the years to come, whenever we visited this unusual place, it made us rethink at least a few of our choices.
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