Four Years of Living, Learning, Teaching, and Becoming Half-Chinese in Suzhou, China
| Home Page ABOUT THE BOOK Why a Memoir? Meaning of the Title Book Format What/Where Is Suzhou? Why Suzhou Is So Fitting for This Book Where Can I Buy The Book? SELECTED PREVIEWS Chapter 5: Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? Chapter 20: A Precious Belt Chapter 29: A City Shuts Down UPDATES SINCE 2006 Our Story Suzhou's Story EXTRA PHOTOS Related to the Book Suzhou 2001-2006 Suzhou Since 2006 ABOUT: The Author My Next Book My SuzhouPlus Website |
 
 WHAT AND WHERE IS SUZHOU?
Suzhou is a 2,500-year-old city located on the Yangtze Delta plain, about 50 miles west of Shanghai, 30 miles southwest of the Yangtze River, and 12-15 miles northeast of Lake Tai, China's third largest freshwater lake. The city is located in a temperate climate zone in a latitude roughly the same as Jacksonville (FL), characterized by hot, humid summers and cool, wet winters that seldom see snowfalls. Although the city is only mid-sized by Chinese standards, its urban district population of 2.6 million would place it fourth largest in the United States after New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Founded in 514 BCE as the capital city of the then-powerful Wu State, Suzhou was designed as a "water town," characterized by a series of north-south and east-west canals to help control flooding in the area. Many of the early roads ran directly alongside these canals, leading one observer to describe the city as a "double-lined chessboard." Suzhou was for many centuries surrounded by a massive wall, with inner and outer moats and six water and land gates for access and egress. From the air today, the still-existing outer moat gives the "old city" the appearance of an elongated rectangle. The "old city" has now been surrounded by expanded urban/suburban growth in all directions, most spectacularly in the past two decades by new industrial parks on its eastern (Suzhou Industrial Park, or SIP) and western (Suzhou New District, or SND) flanks. These two suburbs are home to modern high-rise apartment complexes, shopping malls, and arts and culture centers in addition to hosting such international companies as Bosch, Pfizer, Sony, Procter & Gamble, L'Oreal, Emerson Electric, Epson, Sumitomo, Sanyo, Upjohn, Kraft/Nabisco, Canon, Siemens, Philips, Advanced Micro Devices, Samsung, Panasonic, Black & Decker, Honeywell, BASF, and Nokia. The city's numerous canals and bridges necessitated by those waterways led early commentators, including Marco Polo and Matteo Ricci, to compare Suzhou with Venice, although Suzhou's seniority in existence, size, wealth, and cultural achievement rightfully dictate that the modern appelation of Suzhou as the "Venice of China" should have been reversed so as to label Venice the "Suzhou of Europe." By the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Suzhou was fabulously wealthy, highly cultured, populated with literati, and boasted a population commonly estimated at three-quarters of a million to a million people. The historical source of the city's wealth was agriculture, primarily rice but also winter wheat, fruits, vegetables, tea, and fish. In the middle ages, silk was added to this mix so successfully that Suzhou became the center of China's silk production and trade. To this day, the city continues to specialize in silk production and technology as well as the artistic use of silk for its renowned double-sided silk embroidery. Modern visitors to Suzhou are drawn there first and foremost for its collection of UNESCO World Cultural Heritage gardens, designed and built in a style that are uniquely and immediately identifiable throughout the country. In fact, China's emperors constructed Suzhou-style gardens in their Beijing palaces and at the Imperial Summer Resort at Chengde, north of Beijing. In the last twenty years, gardens in this classical style have been designed and built by Suzhou artisans in Vancouver (B.C.), Portland (OR), Staten Island (NYC, NY), and Los Angeles. A small courtyard from Suzhou's Master of Nets Garden has even been duplicated in the Chinese art section of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to the gardens, Suzhou offers a wealth of other historical sites, including the city's famed leaning pagoda atop Tiger Hill. There are also Buddhist, Confucian, and Taoist temples and pagodas, cultural performances of pingtan (ballad singing) and Kunqu (a predecessor to Peking Opera), museums (including the new Suzhou Museum designed by world-famous native son I.M. Pei), scenic spots such as the thousand-year-old, 53-arch Precious Belt Bridge or the remains of the city wall at Panmen Gate, boat rides on the Grand Canal, and even a visit in the near western suburbs to Qionglong Mountain, home to the reclusive Sun Tzu while he wrote his legendary book of military strategy, The Art of War. |