Suzhou

For everyone, who has been long awaiting my next post, here it is! I tried to catalog my amazing Chinese New Year adventure, and I did... in my journal. Perhaps the greatest adventure of my life, it is too many words to re-write. As I will be eager to see you all, to make you hang out with me and listen to me drone on about the wild unknowns of China, I'm saving those tales for when I see each of you in person.

Saturday, as you all know, was Valentine's Day. Though not a big deal amongst the Chinese constituency, it's still hot with Shanghai's large expat community. However, we spent the day in Suzhou, a city about an hour and a half west of Shanghai, historically significant, as it gained popularity and grandeur during the Ming Dynasty, when it flourished due to its key role in the silk trade. Suzhou is now famed for its gardens, famous sites, and factories.

We started out the morning at the Gardens of the Humble Administrator or Zhuozheng Yuan.



If you care for a brief history lesson, the gardens were first built in the 16th century by a retired magistrate. However, the ownership of the gardens changed many times since then, as has subsequently undergone further development and ornamentation with each owner.

The gardens imitate many facets of nature important to Chinese symbolism, such as lotus flowers, waves, and mountains. The garden also features many Tai Hu rock displays. Wikipedia tells us that, "sculptural Taihu rock is especially prized because it represents wisdom and immortality, and is only procurable from Tai Lake, just west of Suzhou. During the Song dynasty, they were the most expensive objects in the empire."



While these objects make for wonderful pieces of sculpture, they also make for great climbing. As we're all just big kids, we were up and down every taihu sculpture in the garden.

A lot of aspects of the garden were pulled from traditional Chinese songs or poems.



The garden consists of several resting houses and pagodas, that are surrounded by all manners of man-made lakes, canals, hills, caves, and vegetation. The idea is that by creating elements of nature, they were creating areas for contemplation, places to seek inspiration.



After the Gardens, we headed to a silk factory to see and learn how silk is made. A guide showed us around and explained to us that the worms whose cocoons produce silk threads, are drawn to the area because of the mulberry bushes that grow there. They pick the cocoons and then unravel them for the silk. It was interesting to see. There were very few women working the day we were there... partially because it's Saturday, but also because the mulberry isn't in bloom and there aren't very many worms. Did you know that it takes such a long time to procure the silk that they only can weave about 5 meters of fabric a day?!



We grabbed lunch at a restaurant right beside the factory. The food was less than amazing, but we were all starving, so we inhaled it, before getting back on the bus. On the ride over to our next destination, Ryan, a class clown of sorts, overtook the mic often used by tour guides and entertained us all with Chinese raps, "history" of Suzhou, and other gimicks. It killed the time in a great way until we arrived at Tiger Hill, our final destination of the day.



Tiger Hill, or Huqiu Shan, is the burial grounds of King He Lu, the founder of Suzhou. Apparently the hill gets its name from the rumor that three days after he died a white tiger came to guard his remains and refused to leave. During the Song Dynasty, a pagoda was built on top of the hill. The Cloud Rock Pagoda (Yunyan Ta) is now the second most leaning structure in the world (or so I hear?) We were pretty tired after running around all these spots, so most of us slept on the bus back.



It is supposed to look like I'm blowing over the pagoda! Oh well!