Fuddland

In part prompted by a brief visit by my mother, I’ve visited a number of popular tourist sites in Sūzhōu (苏州) over the last few weeks, which made a welcome change from the usual routine.

Tiger Hill

Hǔ Qiū (虎丘), Tiger Hill is probably Sūzhōu’s most famous attraction: a park just outside the old city, it’s like a wilder, much larger version of the classical private gardens, well worth visiting more than once. Its central feature is the pagoda, unusual due to being constructed of stone rather than wood, and with a pronounced lean. Built in the tenth century, it predates Italy’s Leaning Tower of Pisa by a couple of hundred years, although it didn’t start leaning until around four hundred years ago. The signage nearby claims that the pagoda is taller than the Tower of Pisa, but some cursory fact-checking reveals this not to be the case.

In the 1950s an effort to stabalise the tower by pumping concrete into the soil revealed several artifacts, including a casket containing Buddhist scriptures confirming the construction date. Legend has it that an ancient king is buried beneath the pagoda along with thousands of swords, but the precarious lean means that excavating underneath it is impossible without destroying the tower.

As well as the pagoda, there are acres of space to explore, and I happily spent a good few hours just wandering around, not minding one bit when I occasionally found that I’d doubled-back on myself. The bamboo forest was particularly lovely — very peaceful, I could happily sit in the central gazebo with a good book for a couple of years.

The Master of the Nets

So-ironically-named because the government official who used it as his residence after retiring declared he’d rather be a fisherman than a bureaucrat, however bad — Wǎngshī Yuán (网市园), Master of the Nets Garden is one of the smaller gardens but still gives the illusion of being spacious thanks to some clever layout and the strategic use of a single mirror.

Sūzhōu No.1 Silk Factory

This exhibition-factory has a fully-working silk production line, demonstrating the whole process from raising silk worms to weaving complex patterns. The most interesting thing to learn was that ten percent of all cocoons contain two worms, their threads so intertwined they are impossible to unravel; instead, these are pulled apart and layered — thousands upon thousands of layers — to form beautifully soft, light yet warm quilts.