In the early modern times in China, local planners have made several construction plans for Hangzhou’s old city center and the West Lake, resulting in the gradual formation of a city-lake integrated urban form, which is valued nowadays for its uniqueness and characteristically Chinese cityscape aesthetics. The key plan that spurred this process of linking the old city with the West Lake was a plan titled “Building a New Market”(1914). By elucidating the time, process, and contents of the plan, this paper analyzes the spatial transformation of the lakefront districts based on old maps, and then interprets how it led the forming process of the “city-lake integrated” urban form in Hangzhou. In the early modern times in China, local planners have made several construction plans for Hangzhou’s old city center and the West Lake, resulting in the gradual formation of a city-lake integrated urban form, which is valued nowadays for its uniqueness and characteristically Chinese cityscape The key plan that spurred this process of linking the old city with the West Lake was a plan titled “Building a New Market” (1914). By elucidating the time, process, and contents of the plan, the spatial transformation of the lakefront districts based on old maps, and then interprets how it led the forming process of the “city-lake integrated” urban forms in Hangzhou.