Ningbo is where three rivers meet, the Yao, the Fenghua and the Yong, and Sanjiangkou, the three rivers' mouth, is the heart of the old city. For more than a thousand years, Ningbo was one of the great ports of China, a place from which silk, porcelain and tea went to Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia, and where the monks and merchants of those countries landed. It was also the southern end of the Grand Canal, which connected it to Hangzhou and the north, and so it was a meeting point of river, canal and sea. Today, Ningbo-Zhoushan is the busiest cargo port in the world by tonnage, and the old waterfront is a neat, modern riverfront park.
Some of the old city survives. The Tianyi Pavilion, a library founded in the sixteenth century, is the oldest private library in China, and its quiet gardens, with ponds and rockeries, are a pleasant retreat. The old Bund area on the river has a historic church, and small museums that tell the story of the maritime trade. The cuisine is a pleasure for seafood lovers, with the yellow croaker, crabs and eels prominent, and the local dessert, tangyuan, glutinous rice balls filled with black sesame paste, is famous across China.
A hundred and fifty kilometres to the north-west lies Hangzhou and the West Lake, a cultural landscape of lakes, causeways, pagodas and hills that has inspired poets and painters for a thousand years and was listed by UNESCO in 2011. The Hangzhou Bay Bridge, about thirty-six kilometres long, links Ningbo to the Shanghai side across the muddy waters of the bay. The surrounding plain is flat and crowded, with canals, rice fields and factories.
Riding in this part of China is, for foreigners, extremely difficult, since most are not allowed to ride their own bikes or to rent them freely, so trains and taxis are the practical choice. Fuel and services are everywhere in the city, which has about three and a half million people in the urban area. Spring is mild and rainy, summer is hot and humid with typhoons possible in late summer, and autumn is the best season.