Wenlan Pavilion, Qing imperial library in Hangzhou, China

Wenlan Pavilion is a two-story library building set inside a garden on Gushan Island, near West Lake in Hangzhou. It sits on a small pond and is reached by a corridor that winds through a rocky cave before opening onto the building.

The pavilion was built in 1782 on the orders of Emperor Qianlong, who had several libraries constructed to protect the Siku Quanshu. It was destroyed around 1861 during the Taiping Rebellion and later rebuilt in 1880, after which it returned to its original purpose.

Wenlan Pavilion is one of only seven libraries that Emperor Qianlong had built to house the Siku Quanshu, a vast collection of Chinese writings gathered during the Qing Dynasty. Visitors today can walk through the garden and see how the setting was designed to give a sense of reverence around the act of reading and preserving texts.

The pavilion is on Gushan Island near West Lake and can be reached on foot along the lakeside paths. It is worth setting aside enough time to walk through both the garden and the building itself, as they are best explored at a slow pace.

After the pavilion collapsed in 1861, the Ding Bing and Ding Shen brothers gathered scattered volumes and funded a trip to Shanghai to buy missing books, which returned to Hangzhou in 1864. Ding Bing then used his own 8,000-volume library to pay copyists, completing 2,174 titles by 1888.