Evening breeze over the pond, lotus fragrance drifting along the shore. On the evening of August 1, 2026, the “Yanyu Lake Midsummer Fun Season · Lotus Cool-Summer Week” opened at the Twelve Cedar Lodge hotel in the Yanyu Lake scenic area of Wucheng District, Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province. Hanfu styling, a lotus-feast tea break, flower-arranging workshops and a lakeside night tour went live at the same time, offering visitors a cool and poetic summer evening in a distinctly guofeng setting.
A 20-meter long table ran down the hotel lobby, dressed with lotus flowers in bamboo-tube vases. Iced fresh lotus-seed soup, iced lotus-leaf tea, lotus flower cakes, lotus-seedpod pudding and other “lotus-line” cold drinks lined up beside local farm tea snacks, letting visitors taste summer in every bite. Lotus and its by-products are a classic summer refreshment theme in Chinese food culture — light, cooling and fragrant — and the menu leaned into that tradition. At the flower-arranging corner, a steady crowd gathered: visitors made their own arrangements from fresh lotus flowers and lotus pods, and took the finished pieces home as souvenirs. Hanfu-clad visitors drifted among the tables and along the pond, a moving scene against the moonlight — the evening’s most photographed sight. For those arriving in everyday clothes, the on-site Hanfu styling and makeup stations offered the chance to switch into period dress on the spot and join the scene themselves, turning the whole night into an open-air guofeng stage.
As dusk settled, flower-decorated sightseeing carts strung with pink-and-white lotus blooms rolled out along the Yanyu Lake loop, threading through the heart of the lotus ponds. Visitors could hop off at any point to photograph the ponds under starlight and lamplight, soaking up the night-blooming beauty of summer. The carts let the experience reach beyond the hotel lobby and into the natural lotus fields themselves, turning the whole lakeshore into the stage.
The event makes the most of the scenic area’s natural lotus ponds and dodges the heat of the day: it is a nighttime, guofeng cool-down experience, free to all visitors, with no consumption and no reservation required — anyone on site can simply join in. “Out of 100 points I give it 101 — the extra point is for the surprise,” said Tang Chuanhao (唐传皓), a visitor who had come specially from Hangzhou. “I only came for the weekend with my cousin to relax, and I never expected to run into such a thoughtfully made event, complete with a cart ride around the lake. I’ll be recommending it to my friends.”
According to the organizer, the Lotus Cool-Summer Week is Yanyu Lake’s experiment in activating nighttime traffic and building a guofeng IP: free experiences encourage visitors to share voluntarily, lifting both online reputation and offline footfall. Next, Yanyu Lake says it will keep mining local ecology and culture for more immersive cultural-tourism projects, adding new momentum to the high-quality development of Wucheng’s tourism sector.