“上有天堂，下有苏杭,” or “Heaven is above and Suzhou and Hangzhou are below.” This well-known Chinese phrase has long been used to describe the famed beauty of Suzhou and Hangzhou. During the national holiday, my friend and I decided to see the famed beauty of Suzhou ourselves (since we heard it was a bit less touristy than Hangzhou).
Perhaps Suzhou was less touristy than Hangzhou, but it was still packed with tourists during the holiday week (not the best time to go, if you can avoid it). Our hostel, Suzhou Mingtown Youth Hostel, was right on Pingjiang Road, a historic street running right alongside a canal. Although the street was quite touristy, it was lively and offered a great selection of street food, restaurants, and cute shops, as well as the occasional whiff of stinky tofu (臭豆腐 – smells awful but many people quite like the taste). There were multiple gondolas on the canal that were available for tourists as well.
Not too far up the road from Pingjiang Street were two of Suzhou’s most famous gardens, the Lion Forest Garden (狮子林) and the Humble Administrator’s Garden (拙政园). Our first stop was the Lion Forest Garden, which we were excited about because of the beautifully grotesque rocks that give the garden its name and supposedly made quite a few labyrinthine paths throughout the grounds. This was indeed the case, but unfortunately the crowds contributed to quite a few bottlenecks throughout the winding mazes. The entrance fee was 40 RMB. This garden was built during the Yuan Dynasty (1342) by a Zen Buddhist monk – the only such garden to survive. The Kangxi and Qianlong Emperors of the Qing Dynasty also visited the garden, and the Qianlong Emperor had a replica of it built in his Summer Palace in Changchun.
After taking a break for lunch to try and catch our breath, we braved the crowds again to visit the Humble Administrator’s Garden, the largest and most famous garden in Suzhou. As with the Lion Forest Garden, the Humble Administrator’s Garden was crowded with tourists in town for the national holiday, and had a steep entrance fee – 90 RMB. The grounds of the garden were quite lovely, but I wish we had been there during the summer, when the lotus flowers were blooming on the ponds. The Humble Administrator’s Garden was created as we now know it during the Ming Dynasty by scholar Wang Xiancheng, and took 16 years to complete (1526). Wang’s close friend, artist Wen Zhengming, worked on the garden and named it after a verse in Jin Dynasty scholar Pan Yue’s An Idle Life. Apparently, the author of the Chinese literary classic Dream of Red Chambers (红楼梦), Cao Yueqin, is said to have lived in the garden in his teenage years, and many Chinese scholars believe that the garden scenery described in this book is based on the Humble Administrator’s Garden.
As the line for the Suzhou Museum was an hour long, we decided to go back to the hostel for a nap before dinner. Best decision ever. After sleeping off our garden exhaustion, we ventured out onto Pingjiang Lu for dinner to a nearby restaurant serving Suzhou specialties. Our choices weren’t exactly healthy, but very delicious – baked dates filled with glutinous rice, candied lotus roots, and dong po rou (东坡肉), a mouth-watering stir-fried pork dish that melts in your mouth, named after the Song poet Song Dong Po, who loved this dish. My friend and I agreed that this was one of the highlights of our trip – meat so tasty that we almost wanted to serenade it!
On the second day, we finally braved the Suzhou Museum (苏州博物馆), which is right next to the Humble Administrator’s Garden. The current museum building was designed by Chinese-American architect I.M. Pei and opened to the public in 2006. It has a sleek, modern feel to it, with sharp edges and mostly in shades of black and white. The artifacts on display are as old as the Three Kingdoms period (around 180-280 A.D.) and also include many items from the Ming and Qing periods. These include pottery, ceramics, jade, and calligraphy. Upon exiting the museum, you can wander the former grounds of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom’s Zhong Prince (this was a mid-19th century kingdom that precipitated a civil war in the Qing Dynasty for over 10 years).
Many of the artifacts from the Three Kingdoms period were excavated from the nearby Tiger Hill (虎丘), which we explored later that afternoon. Tiger Hill was my favorite place I visited in Suzhou because not only does the mountain have less crowds, more open spaces, and beautiful scenery, but the historical legends behind it are fascinating! The 80 RMB we paid to get in was completely worth it. Tiger Hill’s most famous marker is the seven-story Yunyan Pagoda (云岩寺塔), which stands proudly at the top of the hill. It leans like the Tower of Pisa, but its construction dates further back (its construction started around 900 A.D., during the Five Dynasties period). The hill contains many spots of historical significance and natural beauty. My favorite was the Sword Pond (剑池) near the top of the hill. There are said to be around 3,000 swords buried in this pond, but since the foundations of the Yunyan Pagoda rest here, this legend has never been properly investigated.
During the Three Kingdoms period, Suzhou belonged to the kingdom of Wu. Its name comes from one of two sources – one, the hill supposedly looks like a tiger (I didn’t see it); and two, three days after the Wu king Helu was buried here, a white tiger was allegedly spotted on the hill. No one knows exactly where King Helu is buried. His son is rumored to have ordered 1,000 of the men who worked on his father’s grave murdered to keep the burial place a secret. The alleged site of the massacre is on Thousand People’s Rock (千人石), a plaza near the top of the hill that is also near the Sword Pond. All across this plaza, there is colorfully stenciled calligraphy carved into the walls. This attests to the fact that Tiger Hill is not a recent destination for tourists, pilgrims, and other visitors – it has been so for hundreds of years, and even the likes of emperors have left their own carvings on the stones!
My Eclectic Musings 