Suzhou

Suzhou dates its founding to 514 BC, when the kingdom of Wu built a walled capital here under King Helü, whose tomb is traditionally placed under Tiger Hill. The rectangular plan of moats, gates and canals laid down then survived in outline for more than two thousand years, and a stone map carved in 1229 shows a city recognisable in today's lanes. The completion of the Grand Canal in the 7th century put Suzhou on the main artery between the rice-growing south and the northern capitals.

Silk was the making of the city. From the Song dynasty onwards Suzhou wove and traded it on a great scale, with imperial silk workshops under the Ming and Qing, and the wealth it produced paid for the gardens that retired officials and merchants built behind high walls — private compositions of water, rock, plants and architecture meant for scholarly retreat. The city also became a centre of publishing, painting and connoisseurship, its taste setting fashion across the empire.

The 19th century brought disaster. Taiping forces held Suzhou from 1860 to 1863, and the fighting and fires destroyed much of the city and killed or scattered a large part of its population. Recovery was slow, and the city was opened to direct foreign trade by the Treaty of Shimonoseki in 1895. Modern Suzhou changed course in 1994, when China and Singapore began developing the industrial park east of the old town; the city is now one of China's largest manufacturing centres, while the old town is height-restricted and protected, and eight of the gardens were inscribed by UNESCO in 1997 and 2000.

Suzhou's reputation rests on refinement. The old saying that heaven above is matched by Suzhou and Hangzhou below is quoted constantly, and the local idea of a good life — a garden, a tea room, a storyteller, fine embroidery — has shaped Chinese taste for centuries. The gardens are not simply parks: each was composed like a scroll painting, with borrowed views, framed windows and paths that reveal scenes in sequence.

Two performing traditions are central. Kunqu, the classical opera that took shape in nearby Kunshan in the Ming dynasty and was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2001 among the first Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity, is sung in slow, ornamented Wu; pingtan, the city's storytelling, pairs a singer with pipa and sanxian in small rooms and tea houses, and performances still run on Pingjiang Road. The Suzhou dialect they use is famous nationally for its softness.

Craft is the other pillar: Su embroidery, one of China's four great styles, worked so finely that double-sided pieces read from both faces; silk weaving; fan making; jade and sandalwood carving; and the cultivation of penjing miniature trees. Residents are known as courteous, indirect and attached to small pleasures — tea, sweets, canal walks, early morning noodles — and the city treats its heritage rules and its pace of life as a distinction from noisier Shanghai an hour away.

Suzhou is a prefecture-level city of six urban districts and four county-level cities — Kunshan, Changshu, Zhangjiagang and Taicang — and counted about five million registered residents in 2023, with many more living there without local registration; the protected old town holds a small fraction of that, and its population has aged as families moved to newer flats. A large share of residents are migrants from other provinces working in the factories and services of the eastern and western districts.

The economy is one of the strongest in China. Electronics, machinery, chemicals, precision manufacturing, biomedicine and nanotechnology cluster in the industrial park and the high-tech zone, much of it foreign-invested, and Kunshan alone was the first county-level economy in China to pass 500 billion yuan of output. Silk and embroidery survive as small-scale and luxury trades, and tourism supports the old town.

Daily life divides between the two cities. In the old town people shop in small markets, eat noodles at dawn, exercise in the garden squares and move by bike or metro through lanes where new building is tightly controlled. In the park districts life is that of a modern planned city: towers, international schools, malls and lakeside promenades. Housing costs, long commutes from the outer districts and the pressure of tourism on the canal streets are the everyday complaints.

Suzhou cooking is the refined end of the Jiangsu school: sweet, seasonal and precise, built on freshwater fish, shrimp, lotus root, water chestnuts and bamboo shoots. The signature dish is songshu guiyu, mandarin fish scored, fried until the flesh opens like a squirrel's tail and dressed in a sweet-sour sauce. Watermelon chicken, braised pork with cherry-red glaze and stir-fried river shrimp with eggs belong to the same tradition, and autumn brings hairy crabs from Yangcheng Lake.

Everyday eating means noodles. Suzhou noodle houses serve fine white noodles in a clear, carefully made broth with a topping ordered separately — braised pork belly, smoked fish, eel fried with garlic, or shredded chicken — and regulars specify the amount of broth, the firmness and whether they want spring onion. Sanxia wontons, sweet fermented rice soup and pan-fried buns fill the rest of the breakfast repertoire.

Sweets are a Suzhou speciality: pine-nut candy, osmanthus-scented cakes, sesame crisps, candied fruit and the flaky, layered local mooncakes filled with pork as well as sweet pastes, sold in confectioners that have traded for generations near Guanqian Street. Biluochun, the green tea grown among the fruit trees of the Dongting hills on Lake Tai, is the drink that goes with them, and the region's yellow rice wine appears with crab in autumn.