唐代文豪白居易在西湖筑起白堤(Bai Causeway),西湖自此开启长约千年的景观营造过程。北宋苏轼的疏浚工程规模也很大,不仅修筑了苏堤,还留下了许多美妙诗篇,这也是日后西湖作为文人士大夫精神家园的源头。年复一年,代复一代,西湖经他们的妙笔点画后,真正成为文化与自然双重景观并存的文化名湖。有人把西湖解析成一个“正方体”,它有 6个清晰的平面,其中就包括自然景观和文化史迹。
The long process of constructing the landscape of West Lake, which lasts more or less one thousand years, begins with Bai Juyi, a literary giant in the Tang Dynasty who built Bai Causeway in the lake. Later in the Northern Song Dynasty, the dredging project by the famous poet Su Shi also had a great scale. The poet not only built Su Causeway, but also left many wonderful poems for the West Lake, which turned out to be the very explanation why West Lake later became the spiritual homeland for scholars and scholar-bureaucrats. Year after year, generation after generation, after the stippling by all those wonderful pens, West Lake now has truly become a famous lake with the coexistence of cultural and natural landscapes. West Lake is illustrated as a “ Cube” with six clear facets, among which are natural landscape and cultural historical relics.