MetalMagus Team Walks West Lake Through Mid-Autumn Rain

The Mid-Autumn Festival gives teams across China a short break each year, and this year it fell in September. Rather than let the holiday pass indoors, a group of MetalMagus employees spent it walking the lakeside paths of West Lake in Hangzhou together.

The walk started in the afternoon, and the weather did what the forecast had promised. Light rain arrived as the group reached the shore and stayed for the rest of the route, softening the hills on the far side of the water into layers of grey and turning the stone paving dark and reflective. The lake was almost still, with a few small boats moving slowly across it. Nobody turned back: raincoats came out, the pace settled, and the team kept to the water's edge until the light began to drop.

Rain on West Lake in late September is not nothing to walk through, but it changes the scenery in a way clear weather does not. Willow branches hung low over the path, heavy with water. The hills across the lake lost their detail and became silhouettes. By evening the water and the sky had almost the same tone of grey, and the lakeside lamps came on against it.

MetalMagus has made architectural stainless steel in Hangzhou since 2001, and most of what leaves the plant is the result of several departments handing a job to the next one — sales, engineering, production, quality, packing and shipping. A walk like this is a simple thing in itself, but it puts people who usually speak on the phone or pass drawings across a desk in the same place for an afternoon. An afternoon of rain on a lakeside path does that more effectively than a meeting room.