Rowing to the same beat, a world away

"Educational exchanges are always the heart of things," she said.

Those shared traditions have also created common ground for a new generation, bringing young people from the two cities together in classrooms, laboratories and everyday life.

Richard Chang, principal at Josiah Quincy Upper School in Boston, has worked at the school for 21 years. In May, Chang took 18 students to Hangzhou.

"I asked the students, 'What surprised you?'" Chang recalled.

Several students said that before the trip, they had formed an image of China shaped in part by one-sided portrayals in the media. In Hangzhou, however, they encountered something very different: a prosperous, modern city, where they visited Zhejiang University and robotics laboratories, and learned about technology companies including the world-leading AI firm DeepSeek.

For Chang, the change was not simply that his students came away with a different impression of a city.

"I can see that the in-person experience amplified our shared humanity," he said.

He recalled a moment when students encountered actors dressed as ancient Chinese scholars. One of them introduced himself as Su Dongpo, the Song Dynasty (960-1279) poet who lived in Hangzhou.

The students immediately recognized him. "Oh, Dongpo rou!" they shouted, referring to Dongpo pork, a famous Hangzhou dish created and named after the poet.

"If students simply watched a documentary in a classroom, they might not feel much," Chang said. "But when they actually traveled to Hangzhou and found themselves inside the scene, a culture that had once seemed abstract became part of their own experience."

In Hangzhou, the Quincy students also met Tong Yuqi, a student at Hangzhou No 14 High School.