On Wednesday, the curtain will raise on the Third Annual World Internet Conference at Zhejiang Province's well-known water town - Wuzhen. Over the past two years, the town has successfully captured the world's attention with two impressive and productive Internet summits.
When the Chinese organizers of the World Internet Conference were going about selecting a permanent conference venue, they wanted a place that is famous as a center for high caliber conferences, possesses a highly developed e-commerce industry and, most importantly, is the epitome of Chinese culture and history, similar to the stunningly beautiful World Economy Forum conference center in Davos, Switzerland.
About 80 kilometers from Zhejiang Province's capital of Hangzhou, where China's giant e-commerce company Alibaba has its headquarters, Wuzhen stands out as the best choice for this annual event due to its well-developed real and cyber economies as well as its rich cultural heritage.
Wuzhen is a town of tradition, literature, art and, most recently, theater, as the First Wuzhen Theatre Festival ended just last month.
Known as the "Venice of the East," Wuzhen is famous for its ancient canals that cross throughout the town in lieu of larger roads, traditional houses with white walls and brick roofs, dark colored stone bridges and slow-paced leisurely lifestyle. A hot tourist attraction, the town is packed with teahouses, boutique hotels and stores selling handmade crafts. It is also home to several renowned Chinese writers and artists, including writer and novelist Mao Dun, painter Feng Zikai and poet Mu Xin. Wuzhen has frequently appeared in their works.
This year will stand out from previous years, as the event will unfold in the newly completed International Internet Conference Center.
An enormous 81,000 square meters in size, the center was designed by Wang Shu, an internationally award-winning architect who was the first Chinese architect to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize back in 2012.
Equipped with a full set of the latest modern facilities and fast Internet services, the building is divided into three areas: a conference center, a reception center and an exhibition center. The conference center has spaces for the event's main venues and 18 meeting rooms, while the exhibition center has eight pavilions.
At first sight, the building looks like a pile of typical Wuzhen houses that have been stacked on top of each other. Whereas a typical Wuzhen home is usually independent, with whitewashed walls and a row of dark cyan bricks on the roof, the building has its entire first story painted in white, and six protruding roofs of jet-like flaps sticking out of the sides of the five floors above. On one side of the building, there is a classical Chinese-style artificial lake next to several slanted white walls. To the west of the building, you can find the Beijing-Hangzhou Grand Canal, one of the oldest canals in the world.
The philosophy behind the building's design adheres to Wang's continued devotion to combining traditional Chinese visuals, history and atmosphere with a modern touch.
"The question of the proper relation of present to past is particularly timely, for the recent process of urbanization in China invites debate as to whether architecture should be anchored in tradition or should look only toward the future," the jury for the Pritzker Architecture Prize said in its citation in 2012.
"As with any great architecture, Wang Shu's work is able to transcend that debate, producing an architecture that is timeless, deeply rooted in its context and yet universal."
"In my view, the relationship between Wuzhen and the Internet is very interesting. Both are fragmented and belong to the people. On the surface, they don't relate to each other at all, but they share the same characteristics at their cores," the Beijing News quoted Wang in a report published on Wednesday.
