Yiwu Xiu Lake

Yiwu Scenery(2) – Xiu Lake

Embroidery Lake (Xiu Lake)has a extremely important position in yiwu people's mind. Many people of Yiwu leave far away their hometown, live and work outside for many years, but they will never forget Yiwu’s regional culture symbols – Xiu Lake and Da An Pagoda. Jiang ZhongLing, as vice chairman of Taiwan's, is Suxi Town of Yiwu. After he left home 52 years, when he got back to visit his hometown in the car, he asked “Is Xiu Lake also there? And Da An Pagoda?”. So we can find these two places become the symbol of home in his mind.

Xiu Lake is also called Xiu Cuan, which is located in west side of Yiwu people's government. It was a great lake at first. Around the lake, surrounded by mountains, set off by rosy clouds. The scene likes the embroidery. So it is also called Embroidery Lake. During the Song Dynasty, the people in Yiwu loved the scenery of this beautiful places, so they built pavilions in lakeside and planted trees and flowers to make Xiu Lake become yiwu’s famous scenic spots. It is said that there are twenty four scenic spots. Another famous reason is many poets created lots of psalm to sing the praises of Xiu Lake. The psalm was spreaded by generation by generation. Previously, near the Xiu Lake was basically farmland. Because of the rivers flood sediment flowed into Xiu Lake what made the lake easy to deposit. And every dynasty had to repeatedly dredge. The thirteenth years in Song Dynasty, magistrate of the county made the Embroider Lake as a pond and banned for fishing and mining clam. And he also led people to start construction of water conservancy to irrigate farmland. In ChunXi Time(1174-1189), because there were much rain during spring and summer, the canal was hard to flow for irrigation. So the magistrate of this county Wu Wo intervened in and built a sluice and a stone bridge. The second year of Kaixi(1206), Wu Qian was the magistrate; the fifth year of Jing Ding(1264), Lin Guifa was also the magistrate, they all had manage Xiu Lake. But later, there was no one to do it. Xiu Lake deposited. When met the year of drought, lake’s water dried up. So at last it may be disaster.

But after the administering of Kong Keyuan, a magistrate who was from  Shandong Province, Xiu Lake recovered as before. It becomes a very beautiful lake and a good place for travelling in Yiwu City.