Han Xizai's Reading Terrace

Location

The terrace lies inside the Wuxiang Mountain scenic area in Honglan Subdistrict. On its "Places of Note" page the Lishui District government website lists the "Southern Tang reading terrace of Han Xizai" together with the Huifeng Mountain hominid fossil site and Wuxiang Temple as cultural landmarks of the district; the district profile says the same.

A notice from the Wuxiang Mountain scenic area states that the terrace lies within the scenic area and was designated a "World Capital of Literature landmark" in 2019. The notice comes from the area's management and its authority is limited, and this entry marks it as such. The designation is a cultural marker, not a grade of protected site.

According to the district Culture and Tourism Bureau's reply of 28 November 2023 to a district proposal, the six themed walking trails built in the Wuxiang Mountain area link a series of scenic nodes including the hedge gardens, cherry blossom valley, the "taking charge" rock, wild boar forest, Yunhe Pavilion, the longing-for-home terrace, the tiger-catching ridge, the gifted-child ground, Meicheng Cottage, and Han Xizai's reading terrace. The terrace is accordingly one node in the scenic area's trail network, a cultural stop on a visitor route rather than a separate site open to visitors on its own.

What the gazetteer records

The earliest gazetteer entry held here is in the Kangxi gazetteer of Lishui County, in the mountains section of its mountains-and-waters treatise:

中有唐建禪寂寺及南唐韓熙載讀書台址、大士石像。古桧、銀杏皆唐宋間植。

— Kangxi Gazetteer of Lishui County, juan 5, mountains and waters treatise

This record supplies three facts: the terrace site already existed in the Southern Tang; the terrace stood on Wuxiang Mountain together with a meditation temple built in the Tang and a Guinyin image; and the old cypress and ginkgo on the mountain were planted between the Tang and Song. The text is in the public domain and is transcribed without alteration.

What the record does not supply must be kept separate: it gives only that a terrace site was on the mountain, not its form, orientation, or dimensions, and it says nothing about Han Xizai's own life. Here the gazetteer establishes a location and a lower bound of date, which is not enough to show that the original structure survives today.

Corroboration with Tao An

Tao An's Record of a Visit to Longming Mountain, in juan 17 of the Collected Works of Tao An, notes the ruin of Han Xizai's reading hall and that the cypress he had planted was still standing. This agrees with the Kangxi gazetteer in two respects: a reading hall ruin appears in the account of a writer of the late Yuan and early Ming, a terrace site appears in an early Qing gazetteer, and the old planted cypress is recorded in both.

Two points need to be kept apart. First, the names differ: the gazetteer has a reading terrace site while Tao An has a reading hall, and whether the two denote one structure is not established by any source held here, so they are not merged into one object. Second, Tao An's identification of Longming Mountain with Wuxiang Mountain is his own judgement and the gazetteer does not record it; that layer is already worked through in this library's culture-section entry on Tao An's record, and it is not repeated here beyond noting that the travel account agrees with the gazetteer on the terrace.

The sources give no year for Tao An's visit, so no date of composition is given. Neither the gazetteer nor the travel account records the year in which Han Xizai read here. The relation between Lishui and Han Xizai's movements in the Southern Tang belongs to the biographical section; this entry covers only the place.

Designation: place-name heritage, not monument protection

The terrace appears in no list of protected sites at national, provincial, municipal or district level, so no protection_level is given. That is the conclusion under the monument-protection system.

Separately, in the fifth batch of place-name cultural heritage published for public comment by the Lishui District Civil Affairs Bureau on 3 June 2026, "Han Xizai's reading terrace" is listed under Honglan Subdistrict, in the category of commemorative facilities. Place-name cultural heritage is a separate system from the protection of monuments and the two must not be merged: inclusion does not make the terrace a protected monument, and the document is a draft published for comment, so the formal list is the one to be issued by the bureau. This entry cites it as "according to the 2026 civil affairs bureau notice." The notice gives no origin or date for the terrace and none may be inferred from it.

Open questions

• Whether the terrace site of the gazetteer and the reading hall of Tao An are one structure is not established; both names stand side by side.
• The form of the terrace, whether a platform site, an inscription, or a later commemorative structure, its orientation, and its dimensions are not recorded by any source held here.
• The gazetteer says only "terrace site" and does not state whether this is the same place now called the reading terrace, so this entry gives no history of the terrace's form.
• The body that conferred the 2019 "World Capital of Literature landmark" designation and the basis for it are not recorded in the scenic area notice.
• Han Xizai's own career and his relation to Lishui in the Southern Tang belong to the biographical section and are not set out here; a biographical entry should wait until sources are gathered.
• No entry on the terrace was found in the volumes of the Guangxu gazetteer of Lishui County that have been read here; see the reading limits recorded in this library's culture-section entry on Tao An's record of a visit to Longming Mountain.