Fuddland

The city's famously beautiful classical gardens.

This category is a subcategory of China.

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

Tiger Hill

Hu Qiu is probably Suzhou’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—Wangshi Yuan 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.

Suzhou 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.

One of the more popular gardens in Suzhou is Shizi Lin, in the north of the city. It’s a fairly large, and elaborately-designed area; originally laid out in 1342 by a monk in honour of his teacher, it is decorated with rocks specifically selected for their supposed resemblance to lions in various poses which, once chosen, were submerged in a nearby lake for decades for futher erosion.

There are three distinct areas in the garden:

• the buildings, near the main entrance, with traditionally-decorated rooms with names such as The Hall of Peace and Happiness, The Pavilion of Contrast, and The Flower Basket Hall

• the large artificial lake, which manages to appear to be on several different levels due to the undulating pathways that surround it and bridges that cross it

• the central island, with its labyrinthian network of rocks and tunnels

Due to its size, despite there being hundreds of noisy visitors receiving guided tours in groups, it was possible to find quiet spots all over the garden, to sit for a few moments and listen to a nearby waterfall or watch the monster goldfish swim past.

I have to say I’m not a great fan of the style of rock formation that was on display. I’ve seen it in many other places—in Benxi, Shenyang, and here in Suzhou—so I suppose it’s a very traditional technique, but not one that generally appeals to me. Although I could see the resemblance to lions in a lot of the stones, most of the time they just looked like badly-modelled representations of partially-melted Swiss cheese or, in one case, a disturbing lizard-faced creature. But the water-features and overall layout more than made up for this lack of asthestics, and I spent a good couple of hours wandering the passages and hallways of Shizi Lin, sunning myself on the small peaks and cooling off in the underground caves.

[See a collection of photos from Shizi Lin in my Flickr photoset.]

As I said, after a couple of hours of walking around the main streets of Suzhou in the rapidly-increasing heat, I was about to head back home when I noticed the entrance to one of the city’s renowned private gardens, and decided to wander in for a closer look. Paying my 20元 and looking at the ticket, I discovered this was Canglang Ting [variously translated as Surging Waves Pavilion, Calm Waves Pavilion, or simply Blue Waves Pavilion]. Reading my guidebook at home later, I found that, at around a thousand years old, this is the most ancient of the surviving gardens—a fitting place to begin my [intended] frequent visits to Suzhou’s gardens.

Initially, I have to say, I was disappointed: things were a little too unkempt for the pristine, magical image of Suzhou’s gardens I had been carrying around in my head. But I soon warmed to the wildness of the place, and was surprised at how long I could spend wandering between the buildings and outdoors, discovering new rooms where I thought I’d been before, and all in relative peace—only three or four other people were visiting at the same time as me.

[See the photos in my Flickr photoset.]