An hour by high-speed train from Shanghai, Suzhou has been China's city of gardens for a thousand years. The classical gardens here — ten of them listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites — are the reason most people come, and they are worth the journey. Packed into small plots behind whitewashed walls, each one is an exercise in illusion: miniature hills, reflecting pools, and moon gates that make a quarter-acre feel like a landscape.
The finest of the gardens is the Humble Administrator's Garden, the largest and most celebrated of the classical parks, designed in the 16th century with a central lake surrounded by pavilions and covered walkways. The Garden of the Master of the Nets is the smallest and most refined. The Lion Grove Garden has an extraordinary rockery maze. The Canglang Pavilion is the oldest, dating to the Song dynasty, with a rougher and more naturalistic character than the later Qing-era gardens.
The city itself is built on a grid of canals cut during the Tang and Song dynasties. Much of that infrastructure survives in the old town, where narrow lanes run alongside water and stone bridges cross at regular intervals. The Pingjiang Road neighbourhood is the best-preserved stretch of traditional canal streetscape. Shantang Street runs for 3.5km along a Tang-dynasty canal out to Tiger Hill, where a leaning 10th-century pagoda surveys the city. It's quieter than people expect, especially away from the main tourist circuits around the Xuanmiao Temple and Guanqian Street. The pace is leisurely in a way that Shanghai, forty minutes away, emphatically is not.
Suzhou has been prosperous for most of its history — famous for silk, tea, and the refinement of its scholars and merchants. The Suzhou Silk Museum covers four thousand years of that history. The prosperity also shows in the remarkable Suzhou Museum, the final major work of I.M. Pei, who grew up here and built it adjacent to the ancestral family garden. The food reflects the same refinement: sweeter and more delicate than northern Chinese cuisine, with particular strengths in fresh fish from Taihu Lake and hairy crabs in autumn.
The modern city beyond the old canal district is large and industrial, and not worth much attention. Stay focused on the historic core and you have a city that more than justifies the detour from Shanghai.