Suzhou lives up to billing as ‘heaven on earth’
City charms visitors with its classical gardens and canals, but its silk factory, shops and restaurants will make them linger
It’s known as the Venice of the East, the Garden City and heaven on earth. Whichever moniker you choose, Suzhou delivers. Located just a two-hour drive west of Shanghai Pudong International Airport, or a 30-minute highspeed train ride from Shanghai city centre, Suzhou is a medium-sized city by Chinese standards, with a population of 6.5 million people. It has seen explosive development since the mid-1980s, with sleek skyscrapers now crowding sections of the city, including a building named “trousers” because of its pants-like silhouette.
Yet, once you venture beyond the developed core’s Suzhou Industrial Park, the vibe is distinctly old world. In the ancient corners of the city, temple tops soar skyward, immaculately preserved gardens carpet courtyards and quiet canal-side eateries await lunchtime visitors.
Suzhou has no shortage of tourist-friendly sights. English is not widely spoken and few menus include English translations. Unless you speak Mandarin, you’re best off touring with a guide. Here are a few places for your itinerary:
Master of the Nets Garden
One of Suzhou’s nine UNESCO World Heritage Site gardens, the Master of the Nets Garden is an ideal place to find your Zen.
The garden and buildings on the property were built in the 12th century to serve as the home of a wealthy scholar turned fisherman, hence the name Master of the Nets. Travelling through the garden’s mazelike design today, you’ll find a collection of decades-old tiny bonsai trees, circular courtyard entranceways called “moon gates” and zigzag bridges over placid lakes — zigzagged, so the story goes, to deter ghosts from following visitors across the bridge. It’s one of the city’s best-preserved and smallest classical gardens at just 5,400-square-metres, making your visit feel intimate, no matter how many tourists are milling about. “I want to live here,” said a fellow traveller as we passed through a moon gate.
This is just one of hundreds of city-wide gardens that earned Suzhou its “Garden City” nickname.
Hong Deng Ji restaurant Come for the bowling ball-sized sesame pastry and stay for every other mouth-watering dish.
The Hong Deng Ji restaurant is best recognized by the sesame ball that sits on display out front. Inside, traditional pingtan music plays over speakers and the massive skylights lend an alfresco-dining vibe to a moody interior decorated with golden lanterns. The location is popular with locals who eat there in the early morning.
Share the gastronomical delights family-style. Choose the oversized sesame ball and rip it into pieces, and savour the peanuts served in a vinegar sweet and sour sauce, as well as the eel marinating in a rich garlic and ginger soy sauce. The slices of pumpkin will melt in your mouth.
Old Pingjiang Rd. Wandering along the pedestrian road, I regretted eating so much at lunch. The streetside eateries boast a never-ending buffet of meat delicacies on sticks, little squares of cake, and ice cream in cones made from full-size waffles.
The only treat that didn’t tempt me was the pungent-scented fermented “stinky tofu.”
This road is also a great spot to pick up souvenirs, with shops and quirky hipster cafés selling stationery, knick-knacks and tea.
One shop, called Momi Café, invites patrons to write postcards to their future selves or to other people. The postcards are placed in clear cubbies on the wall marked with the date the sender wants the postcard mailed out.
Suzhou noodles at TongDe Xing The hot noodle soup at TongDe Xing was exactly what I needed on a chilly spring afternoon. The soup dish I ordered was brimming with traditional Suzhou noodles, long and thin and made in-house, submerged in a red, meaty-flavoured broth.
Be sure not to arrive too late in the afternoon — the shop is popular with locals and stops selling when noodles run out.
The silk factory I’ll admit it, before this trip, I didn’t know silkworms made silk.
At the No. 1 Silk Factory, I got schooled on the life cycle of the silkworm, the grading process of silkworm cocoons, how the silk thread is unravelled, what happens to twin cocoons — they can be stretched out and used for quilt stuffing — and then how the threads are transformed into ready-for-purchase silk goods.
The gift shop sells silk ties, scarves, skin cream, facial moisturizer and clothing made in Suzhou, a major Chinese hub for silk production.
Moxibustion treatment Moxibustion is a naturopathic treatment that involves using traditional Chinese medicine and heat acupuncture to relieve internal ailments.
I received my treatment at Qing Shan Tang, the Moxibustion Institute. Sitting in the quiet room listening to rain falling outside and soft chatter from next door, the student practitioner lit a herb moxa stick, waving smoking embers in a circular motion behind my neck. I felt warm as my entire body relaxed.
The Moxibustion Institute is a training facility and doesn’t typically treat nonstudents, but two other Suzhou locations, both called Fan Chang Wei Cao Tang, offer moxibustion treatment. Treatments cost 188 to 288 RMB ($36 to $56 Canadian) per hour.
Take a boat ride in Tongli Head to Tongli, a water town on the outskirts Suzhou, to understand why explorer Marco Polo dubbed Suzhou “Venice of the East.”
We hired a wooden boat for 60 RMB ($11 Canadian) for a 30-minute ride and sat back as the gondolier wove us through waterways hemmed in by canal-side eateries. Above us was a canopy of trees, and around us tourists shopped for pearls and a man tangled with eight fishing birds perched on his rickety boat.
Visit Tiger Hill Here you’ll find Suzhou’s largest bonsai garden, with more than 1,000 bonsais ranging from 50 years old to more than 400 years old. A guided tour costs 60 RMB during low season, which is Oct. 31 to April 15, and 80 RMB ($15 Canadian) during high season, which runs April 16 to Oct. 30.
We toured the area with an Englishspeaking guide who led us to a bonsai master taming one of his trees. Using clippers and metal wires, he trimmed and twisted branches into cloudlike shapes.
Heaven on earth status secured, Suzhou. Katrina Clarke was hosted by Travel Suzhou and its partners, none of which reviewed or approved this story.