Gardens Upon Gardens: My Trip to Suzhou

“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.

One of many such labyrinthine passages in the Lion Forest Garden.

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.

A lone lotus flower lingers in the water.

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!

From bottom-left going clockwise: dong po rou, glutinous rice-filled dates, and candied lotus roots.

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.

View of the Yunyan Pagoda from the base of Tiger Hill.

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!

A few of the many calligraphic carvings on Tiger Hill.

Privet, Harbin!

As I begin my semester abroad in Shanghai for the fall, I find that I am consistently mentioning the city of Harbin to my friends. “Harbin has the best night market!” or “The live music is beautiful in Harbin!” or “I heard China’s Northeast described to me as the Texas of China.” It appears that I have many fond memories from traveling this summer, and it has indeed become one of my very favorite cities in China.

Harbin is in China’s Northeast in Heilongjiang Province, which borders on Russia. This means that historically it claims a lot of Russian influence, and that in the wintertime is quite cold. There is a famous annual ice sculpture exhibition (冰雕展）in the city center that boasts stunning creations – it is on my bucket list to return one winter to see this spectacle. The summer weather is quite pleasant there overall – none of the humidity of Shanghai or Beijing. (My first night there, however, the weather was an unusual 35 degrees, which was not ideal for a hostel room that did not have any kind of air conditioning.)

 

Russian performers play along Zhongyang Jie.

When I visited this summer, I stayed in a conveniently located hostel, Solid Stone Hostel (顽石国际青年旅社) that was conveniently right off of Zhongyang Jie (中央街), the historic central street of Harbin. My first evening there, I was pleasantly surprised to find an abundance of live music on the street – mostly Russian performers. Zhongyang Jie contains an abundance of Russian souvenir stores with matreshka (Russian nesting dolls), chocolate, fur scarves and hats, and the like, all while blasting stereotypical Russian melodies. Today, you can still see strong Russian influence in much of Harbin’s architecture. The CCP destroyed most of the Russian Orthodox churches, sadly, but the St. Sophia Cathedral still stands proudly in the city center.

Russian influence in Harbin goes back a long ways. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian government established Harbin as the center of operation for the Chinese Eastern Railway in the region. In 1905, the Russian government used Harbin as its base of military operations in the Russo-Japanese War (which Russia lost – the first time a Western power had been defeated by an Asian one) which was largely about economic influence in Northeastern China. There were actually more Russians than Chinese in the city before the War of Resistance Against Japan. After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, over 100,000 White Russians (those who opposed the Bolshevik regime) fled to Harbin, making it the largest Russian enclave outside of the Soviet Union. Harbin also boasted a large Jewish population, although both the Russian and Jewish populations dropped sharply after the establishment of Manchukuo under the Japanese regime in 1932.

An example of Russian architectural influence.

Today, most foreign tourists and businessmen in Harbin are, in fact, Russian. So it was no surprise, albeit amusing, when Chinese would try out their Russian phrases on me: Privet!, Zdravstvi, or Kak dela? (Of course, their pronunciation was sometimes so muddled that it was hard for me to make out which language they were speaking!) Perhaps most unexpected was when one middle-aged Chinese man in a museum asked me not “你是俄罗斯人吗？”, or “Are you Russian?” but rather “你是苏联人吗？”, or “Are you from the Soviet Union?” When I called him out on it, he sheepishly said that “就是个老的习惯,” or “It’s just an old habit.” Particularly along Zhong Yang Jie, my friend Lara and I had many Chinese tourists ask to take photos of us – more than in any other city I’d traveled to, I think (closest in comparison would probably be downtown Beijing – no one has asked in Shanghai so far).

Locals check out the contents of the food stalls at the night market.

The food in Harbin is pretty delicious. Lot of fried and greasy food, meat, dairy, and big portion sizes. (This is one reason why my friend called Northeastern China the “Texas of China” – for that reason and because people are quite boisterous and in-your-face. The locals love music and dancing as well. And while Texas has a lot of historic cross-border influence from Mexico, for Northeastern China and Heilongjian in particular, it is from Russia.) One of my favorites was guo bao rou (锅包肉), pork meat that is deep fried and breaded in sweet batter. I also tried Harbin-stye ribs, or paigu (排骨). There are special ice-cream bars called ma die er (马迭尔) along with the more traditional Northeast popsicles, xue gao (雪糕，literally translated as “ice cakes” – I wish these were available more in Shanghai, they are light and so tasty!). Lots of breads around as well – my favorite was probably cong you bing (葱油饼), a thin, light bread that spirals around and around in one piece. The chuaer (串儿), or meat kebabs, were also amazing. Lastly, I tried this unique fermented beverage – not alcoholic – that is made out of rye bread called kvass (from the Russian), which was also quite nice. Lastly, my friend Lara and I went to a fantastic night market in Harbin that, in addition to selling all sorts of little trinkets and clothes, had amazing food – we even tried pig feet (zhu jiao, 猪脚)!

Little girls perform a military march glorifying the CCP’s revolutionary heroes, including Cultural Revolution model peasant worker Lei Feng.

One end of Zhongyang Jie comes out by the Songhua River (松花江) in a park that is called, I kid you not, Stalin Park (斯大林公园). This park is the site for many performances. My first night in Harbin, there was some sort of children’s performance festival taking place – I saw one particularly eye-opening performance with dozens of little girls dressed in matching militaresque uniforms shouting out CCP slogans as the background screen shifted between depictions of various revolutionary heroes with accompanying lyrics. (The Cultural Revolution model peasant worker, Lei Feng, is back!) The riverside park also holds a Flood Control monument commemorating the brave efforts of the people of Harbin in combating the 1932 flood. Late at night, you can see young people lighting lanterns and sending them off into the sky along the river bank, and in the early evenings, women gather to dance together while music blares from nearby boomboxes.

Young people light a floating lantern on the banks of Songhua River at night. 

The nearby island, Taiyang Island (Taiyang Dao 太阳岛), which literally translates to “sun island,” is a popular tourist destination as well. We went over by ferry across the river, which was a scenic trip. The island contained several beaches along the shore (which I would advise not to swim in – to our horror, Lara and I noticed that the bathrooms on the ferry docks, which went directly into the water, were right upriver from the beaches!) and a very pretty walkway. The parks featured a “Russian town,” which was unfortunately closed, and a park to commemorate the martyrs in the War Against Japan (not surprising, as this type of narrative is everywhere as part of the CCP’s patriotic education initiatives).

Speaking of the War Against Japan, I also visited several related museums:  Unit 731, which was surprisingly far from the city center, as well as the Museum of Northeastern Resistance Against Japan and the Northeastern Martyrs Memorial Hall. The latter museum, I was surprised to find out, is the oldest of its kind in China, opened to commemorate Chinese martyrs from both the war years with Japan and in the Civil War with the KMT, when Harbin was “liberated.” Unit 731, the old site of the research facility where Japanese army staff conducted horrific biological experiments on Chinese civilians (as well as Russians and POWs), had the most international visitors by far. It was devoid of the visual effects in museums such as the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall, to my surprise, and narrated the history of the site in a very cut-and-dry manner. This, I suspect, only served to make the reality only more horrific. At the other two museums, the main focus was the CCP guerrilla warfare in Manchukuo. The KMT was hardly mentioned, but neither was the US. If I were to understand the history of World War II solely based on these museums, the narrative would go something like this: “The Japanese invaded and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo; the CCP set up the Northeastern Resistance Line and conducted guerrilla warfare; then in 1945, the USSR declared war on Japan and the war ended!”

 

 

Cosmetics, Cafes, and Dokdo for Days: My Initial Impressions of Korea

First of all, let me apologize for the tardiness of this post. I blame China. No, really…most of my social media is literally blocked by the Chinese Great Firewall, as we fondly like to call it. Thus, when I traveled to Beijing and around Northern China after my week in Seoul, I was unable to blog about it. (More on China later.)

I was in Seoul for the AAS-in-Asia Conference (Association of Asian Studies). My friend Anran had graciously put together a panel on China’s ethnic minorities and invited me to join, since my research is pertinent to that subject matter. More conference experience is always better, and of course the fact that the conference would be in Seoul gave me that much more of an incentive to apply. As it is not as common for graduate students to present at this sort of conference, my colleagues and I were of course thrilled to be accepted.

Two of my colleagues and I after presenting our panel.

After arriving at Incheon Airport, my friend Katherine Alice’s husband, Soo Man, graciously picked me up. I stayed with them the first evening in the city of Goyang, which is very close to Seoul. My first day, Katherine Alice graciously showed me around the city. Then, and subsequently in my time in Seoul, I observed the following:

1. Every other store sells cosmetics. If you go to Korea, you’ll understand why. Korean women dress meticulously and wear quite a bit of make-up. Two trends that immediately stuck out to me in make-up were the toner and lipstick. Unlike in the US, in many Asian countries it is considered more desirable for women to have whiter skin. Thus, many women applied very pale toner to their faces to make their skin look even lighter. Also, many Korean women like to wear very bright-colored lipstick, which is pretty affordable as well.
2. Every other store is a cafe. Or sometimes multiple stores in a row. Katherine Alice and I counted 3 cafes in a row one time. She told me that cafes have been growing even more popular here lately. Buying expensive coffees at places like Starbucks is definitely a class symbol (similar in China), and cafes give off a sort of “Western” vibe, making them especially popular with young adults.
3. Plastic surgery is ubiquitous. This is really sad to me, as I am all about natural beauty, but it is quickly becoming the norm. I hate to break it to you, but most of those hunks from Korean dramas…have had at least some kind of face alteration. 😦 There were many plastic surgery advertisements on the subway as well. You can even get a special VISA from China to go to Korea to get plastic surgery!
4. Claw machines – now this trend I really don’t understand. I literally saw ROOMS that were filled with claw machines, all containing different stuffed animals. Since China follows many Korean trends, it was unsurprising to me to see claw machines popping up in northeastern China as well. Although certainly not ROOMS full of them like in Korea!

   

   One of the ubiquitous claw machine rooms.

5. Emphasis on the Japanese colonial period – as a historian, I was not surprised by this. However, I did not expect that Goyang’s local museum would have a large historical section that included not only the comfort women (a euphemism for kidnapped women from different countries in East Asia that were forcibly prostituted to the Japanese army), but also Unit 731 (a research unit for biological warfare that conducted egregious human experiments in Harbin, Northeastern China, then part of the puppet state of Manchukuo). There was even a statue to commemorate the comfort women in the city’s central square.

   

   Statue to commemorate the comfort women in Goyang. Locals even put a scarf, mittens, and a hat on her in the winter.

6. Dokdo – This is an island conflict between Japan and Korea. (There are many island conflicts in East Asia – mostly involving Japan and/or China.) Koreans insist that it is historically theirs, and it has become a huge point of national pride. (My Chinese friend observed shockingly that Korea seemed more nationalistic in some ways than even China.) Dokdo itself is little more than a couple of rocks (similar to the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands that China and Japan are disputing), but has become huge symbolically. Even on the little souvenir magnet I bought with a map of Korea, Dokdo was included!

   

   One of many such posters I saw about Dokdo.

7. Lack of regard for leaders – Perhaps this is because many Koreans have been a bit jaded by their leaders in the Japanese colonial era and the military dictatorship. The only two men I could find a widespread respect for were the two men whose statues grace the Seoul city center – King Sejong and Admiral Yi Sun-sin. King Sejong was responsible for the invention of the Korean hangul alphabet in the early 13th century AD and is credited with strengthening the military; maintaining good relations with Japan, the Ming Dynasty, and the Jurchens of northern China; and many scientific and literary achievements. Admiral Yi Sun-sin was a naval commander whose ingenious turtle boats were largely responsible for beating back Hideyoshi’s attempted invasions from Japan at the end of the 15th century.

Admiral Yi Sun-sin stands majestically in the city center.

On a less serious note…Korean food is delicious! My first day there I tried bingsu, shaved ice with sweet toppings – so tasty! I also ate Korean dumpling soup, spicy chicken hot pot with rice cakes (don’t know the name), beef hot pot, naengmyeon (cold noodles), bibimbap, king dumplings, Korean pancakes, makgeolli (liquor), etc. One thing I love about Korea restaurants is the appetizers – you are always served a variety of prepared, often pickled, vegetables, including kimchi. I heard that there are over 150 varieties of kimchi, which does not surprise me at all! Try not to be jealous while looking at these tasty food pics!

Bingsu

 

Chicken and rice cakes in spicy stew (you eat it while it’s on top of a burner)

 

Korean hot pot!

 

Bibimbap and king dumplings

Any thoughts about Korea? Let me know – would love to answer any questions about my trip!