Marco Polo called Hangzhou—the cosmopolitan capital of China's most decadent dynasties—"City of Heaven." Eight centuries later, Patrick Symmes finds something familiar under the rising skyline: a refined pleasure dome where a good cup of tea melts all resistance

It was 6:03, a porcelain dawn of fog and nothing else, when my body clock finally quit for the American day just as the Chinese one was beginning. I turned off the laptop in my room at the Fuchun Resort, outside Hangzhou, lay down on a settee beneath the window, and finally, with a deep breath, unplugged myself. E-mails and Internet telephony have their advantages—I'd put in a full day's work and had just chatted with my wife at home—but only now, after forty-eight hours in the country, was I really, at last, in China.

Over the next hour, the mist thinned and lifted, receding to reveal first the bushes outside my window and then the foreshore of a pond. A wind blew the surface clear all at once; a rowboat waddled across the water. By seven, the far shore came into view: contoured hills covered with orderly tea plantings dividing several holes of a golf course.

When it is not teatime in China, it is tee time. A few minutes after seven there was a sharp thwack, followed by a cry of anxiety, and the day's first golf ball dropped into the water hazard with a plop. Soon, four Chinese men ambled out of the haze—small, shrouded, and heroic, like the boatmen in a Taoist scroll painting. They peered into the pond and then played on.

It is often foggy in Hangzhou, especially during the long and temperate seasons of spring and fall, when the hot and humid air of the Shanghai lowlands blows in. The city sits on the first row of hills, wrapped in green forest and built around a sheet of cool water. Here, the air chills and condenses into not just billions of tiny droplets but an artistic medium. If Hangzhou is the canvas, then fog is the brush—a subtle and complex mingling of atmospheric conditions that plays out most days throughout the city. In China, landscape is metaphor, its shapes and combinations buried in everything from a sacred peak mimicked in the roofline of a pagoda to the logographic alphabet, in which the character for mountain depicts just that. This obsessive geomancy, a response to the harmonies of the natural world, is what makes Hangzhou catnip to the Chinese.

Having come into prominence during the decadent Sung dynasties (a.d. 960–1279) and filled with grand architecture dating back a millennium, Hangzhou is a living expression of the aesthetic values of imperial China. The lake is not merely a lake, the hills are not merely hills, and the forest that girds the rippling ridges around the city is much more than trees. The ultimate harmony in a landscape is shan shui, or the interplay between mountains and waters, and in Hangzhou the shan shui is simply more copacetic than in most other urban environments. Foreigners may come because of its biotech industry or for a refreshing respite from Shanghai, but the Chinese come for the sight of leaves shivering before a multilayered landscape of hills, as carp dapple the surface of West Lake.

"We often say, 'Above, there is heaven, and on earth there is Hangzhou,'" says Willow Hai Chang, the gallery director at New York's nonprofit China Institute, which promotes traditional and contemporary Chinese culture. She travels to Hangzhou often to prepare exhibitions on its famous silks and ceramic tea sets. When not working, she does what one does there: "Just the basics," she says. "A walk along West Lake is very relaxing. And always, fish." She means the city's famous waterfront restaurants, where a customary dish is lake fish marinated in yellow rice wine until it can be eaten with a spoon. After a $250 million restoration, the waters are cleaner than they have been in decades, the surrounding acres have been reforested, and more than four hundred teahouses have been placed under landmark protection. Hangzhou is preserving the traditional ambience that other cities in China are undoing. The next big project is to restore the Grand Canal, a twelve-hundred-mile waterway connecting Hangzhou to Beijing, which is today a gritty, polluted corridor serving 100,000 coal, grain, and gravel barges a year.