Ningbo

Where the Yuyao, Fenghua and Yong rivers meet, Qing'an Guild Hall is a rare building that served both as a Tianhou temple and a guild for wooden-boat owners.

Regarded as Asia's oldest surviving private library, Tianyi Pavilion takes its name and fire-preventing water garden from a classical saying linking heaven and water.

Baoguo Temple's main hall is the oldest and most completely preserved Northern Song timber building south of the Yangtze, a unique architectural treasure.

Cicheng keeps the chessboard street grid of a Tang county seat, with rows of Ming and Qing mansions recalling its many successful imperial examination candidates.

Dug in the Tang as a city reservoir and shaped into ten islets under Zeng Gong in the Song, the lake became Ningbo's scholarly heart from Song and Yuan times.

On Lantern Festival night the maid Jinlian leads the way with a double-peony lantern and Qiao follows Fu Liqing home; a neighbour peeping through the wall sees a powdered skeleton beside him under the lamp, and in a dark room of Huxin Temple the same lantern hangs before her coffin.

Mentions Moon Lake in Ningbo in “New Tales Told by Lamplight: The Peony Lantern”. Early Ming Dynasty writer (1341–1427 CE), authored the renowned supernatural romance collection 'New Tales Told by the Trimmed Lamp' (Jiandeng Xinhua).

Part of Ningbo's history: Maritime Silk Road Flourishing. Tang emperor of the Kaiyuan and Tianbao eras who took power in the coups of 710 and 713 and fled to Sichuan when An Lushan rebelled

Part of Ningbo's history: Maritime Silk Road Flourishing. Tang Vinaya master from Yangzhou who reached Japan on his sixth attempt in 753, blind by then, and founded the Toshodaiji in Nara

Maritime Silk Road Flourishing

Establishing maritime customs in Guangzhou, inaugurating the flourishing era of Indian Ocean trade.

In 999, the Northern Song court formally established a Maritime Trade Office at Mingzhou to regulate overseas shipping and commerce.

From 1561 to 1566, the retired official Fan Qin built Tianyi Pavilion in Ningbo with a fire-conscious design to preserve his book collection.

A filling of lard, black sesame and sugar in a water-milled glutinous rice skin, boiled in water: the tangyuan of Ningbo.

A white rice cake of late-ripening japonica rice ground wet, steamed and pounded, usually sliced and stir-fried with pork and greens or cooked in soup.

Glutinous rice balls for the 15th of the first lunar month: rolled in a basket in the north, wrapped as tangyuan in the south, with a Southern Song poem by Zhou Bida on cooking them.

Sliced rice cake stir-fried with meat and greens in a soy-based sauce, a Shanghai-style dish often served at Lunar New Year.

At midday on Lixia, people eat boiled eggs, children carry them in thread nets and knock them together to see who wins, and many places in Jiangnan also weigh people.

On the night of the fifteenth of the first month people eat glutinous-rice balls, rolled and called yuanxiao in the north and wrapped and called tangyuan in the south, for the full moon.

On Mid-Autumn night families set out fruit and mooncakes in the courtyard, watch the moon, and share the mooncakes; they also exchange mooncakes as gifts before the festival.

Lin'an lei bamboo shoots have thin husks and white flesh; winter coverings of rice husks and straw bring an earlier harvest.