Wednesday, after eating a Chinese breakfast (alone) of baozi and fruit in the hotel’s restaurant, Tracy and the driver arrived and we began our Suzhou Tour. Suzhou flourished as a major trading and silk center after the Grand Canal was built during the Sui dynasty (6th century). The canal linked Suzhou to the capital. Not surprisingly, one of Suzhou’s nicknames is “Venice of the East”. Trading during the Ming and Qing dynasties made many of the local exporters rich. Much of this wealth was spent in creating over 150 elaborate gardens.
The first garden on our tour was the Lingering Garden. It had beautiful rock formations, ponds, and of course lots of flowers and people. The Lingering garden is well known for having some of the most famous rock sculptures. There are many of these “grotesque rockeries” all over China. They seem to be in all the parks and in front of any building that has the money to put one there. The Chinese kids love climbing all over them and they have some very strange shapes. Since the Song Dynasty (960-1279) masons have been quarrying these limestone rocks from the mountains near Lake Taihu in Jiangsu Province. They shape them a little bit and then stick them in the lake and let nature take over. After a few years they take them out and cement different pieces together to make the final sculpture.
Next stop was a boat ride through the Grand Canal. It isn’t just one large canal it is a bunch of them of different sizes. If you look at a map of Suzhou the waterways look like roads because they create blocked shaped islands. It really did look a little like Venice. There were a lot of unique old stone bridges and the water was surprising very clean. It had the same color and clarity of our marsh waters in Georgia on a good day. Lots of strange fishnets were in the water which Tracy said catch a very small silver fish. (I will experience them later). In the canals I saw a wedding boat, women hand washing their clothes on the rocks, and 2 boats that looked like they were made of cement. (It must have been an optical illusion- I wasn’t quick enough to take a picture).
No Chinese tour is complete without a “factory tour”. This one was of the “Number 1 Silk Factory” I was prepared to tolerate this obligatory tour as I had many times before. I was pleasantly surprised to find that this one was REALLY interesting. Honest! It was a real working factory with the real live silk worms, mulberry trees and all the machinery that actually showed how the cocoon gets turned into silk thread. I would honestly like to go back!
Lunch alone and then onto Panmen Gate which is a water gate and the last part of the original city wall. This present wall/fortress was built in the 1300’s, and consisted of two water passes, two land gates, and an ambush area outside a city gate but inside the first gate so the enemy could be trapped. Inside the gate is the 7 story Ruiguang Pagoda which is the oldest Buddhist pagoda in the area. There were also lots of colorful and hungry coy in the small lake.
We finished up our day early so I added an optional ‘foot massage’ onto the tour. It was worth ever Yuan. They dropped me off for an afternoon break and dinner alone and then a night performance at another garden. There were singers, actors, and instruments. The Suzhou Opera is slightly different from the Peking Opera. Still very nasally and high pitched but not as hard on the ears. It was a much softer sound. My favorite ‘acts’ were the flutes and a weird ‘forerunner’ of the slide guitar.
Bedtime provided some excitement. A man kept banging on my door insisting in Chinese that I was in his room. He finally figured out I wasn’t going to leave or let him in and left. Maybe he just wanted to see the foreigner in her pj’s.
