Shaoxing is the city you already half know — the water town of Lu Xun's schoolboy essays, of awning boats and aniseed beans, of a scholar calligraphing drunk by a stream. Twenty-five centuries old, capital of the ancient kingdom of Yue and brewer of China's most famous rice wine, it is a working city of canals and stone bridges rather than a museum, and one of the easiest day trips — or quiet overnights — on the Hangzhou line.
