My trip to China, part 2: I visit the gardens of Suzhou

A few days ago, I hopped on a very fast Chinese train and rode 25 minutes out of Shanghai to the city of Suzhou. Suzhou is a beautiful city that was built on a series of canals. In fact, it was the third city I have ever visited that is famous for its canals – can you name the other two? Here's a hint: both of those cities are in Europe.

Suzhou has long been a commercial center in China. In fact, it was the center of trade in east central China up until 1860. Before that time, Shanghai was just a sleepy little backwater farther down the river. After that, however, Shanghai grew rapidly in size and dwarfed nearby Suzhou.

Suzhou is most famous for its beautiful gardens. Back when China was an empire, some of the people who reached high positions in China's civil service built very nice houses for themselves. Since Suzhou gets quite hot during the summer, several of these people built elaborate gardens next to their houses so that they could relax in the shade of the cool trees. Loyal readers of this blog will remember that I visited one Chinese garden and one Japanese garden on my trip to Singapore. The gardens of Suzhou represent a very particular style of Chinese garden. One might even say that these gardens are some of the most famous in the entire world!
The first thing you see when you get off the train in Suzhou is the Changmen Gate, which is one of the entrances to the old city of Suzhou. The gate is located on the other side of the Waicheng River (this channel is part of the lower reaches of the Yangtze), so, unless you have a boat, you have to walk around and take the bridge!

I pose in front of Changmen Gate in Suzhou.

Here I am in front of the bridge I took to get into Suzhou.

Many of Suzhou's canals are quite narrow -- just wide enough for two long, skinny boats to pass.

Here is one of Suzhou's canals.

The first garden I visited was called the Humble Administrator's Garden. The administrator who built it may have been humble, but his garden most certainly isn't. It's a huge garden that covers nearly thirteen acres and contains 48 buildings. It was built by a civil servant named Wang Xiancheng, who was so tired of the intrigues and conflicts of serving in the court of the Ming Dynasty that he built himself the garden so he could just hang out and relax.

Here I am in front of the lake in the middle of the Humble Administrator's Garden.

When people construct traditional Chinese gardens, one of their main goals is to achieve a balance among the different elements that go into the garden: trees, water, rocks, and buildings. You shouldn't be able to see the entire garden from one spot; instead, as you walk around it, the landscape should unfold before you bit by bit as if you're unrolling a scroll with a landscape painting on it. Chinese gardens are meticulously designed and maintained so that their visitors see exactly what their designers intended.

Here I am in front of one of the ponds in the Humble Administrator's Garden.

One of the fun things about traditional Chinese gardens is the rock formations. There are lots of little pathways through the rocks that take you up hills and down steep staircases down to the side of the pond. I had a lot of fun exploring the rock formations!

I'm about to go up this rocky staircase.

Interspersed in the garden are lots of buildings. Some of them have whimsical names, like the "listening to the sound of rain pavilion." That's the building you go to when you want to enjoy your garden on a rainy day. This is one of the biggest buildings in the Humble Administrator's Garden. It is typical of traditional Chinese architecture -- note how the corner of the roof curves up into a point.

I pose in front of one of the buildings in the garden.

My favorite building in the Humble Administrator's Garden is the 36 Pairs of Mandarin Ducks Hall. Living in the water under the building are -- you guessed it -- 72 ducks.

Two of the ducks.

I thoroughly enjoyed the Humble Administrator's Garden, but I found it very big and quite overwhelming, especially because it was totally filled with other tourists. Consequently, I think I enjoyed my visit to one of Suzhou's other, smaller gardens more. That other garden was the Shizilin, or "Lion Grove Garden." This garden is older than the Humble Administrator's Garden. It dates from all the way back in the 1300s! It is laid out somewhat differently, with even more rocks and also more walls. In this garden, you go from courtyard to courtyard, and you can always see part of the garden ahead of you through the windows, but you have to go around the wall in order to see all of that next courtyard. So the garden is kind of like a maze.

Here I am in a windowsill with one of the big rock formations behind me.

Lots of the windows have lattice in them so that you can see through, but so that you can't see everything on the other side.

I am tempted to go around into the next courtyard!

The main part of the Lion Grove Garden looks a lot like the main part of the Humble Administrator's Garden, in that each of them is built around a central lake.

Here I am in front of the lake in the center of the Lion Grove Garden.

The lake in the Lion Grove Garden has a very fancy stone boat. Obviously, you can't go out sailing in a stone boat; it's just for decoration.

I look at the stone boat.

Like the Humble Administrator's Garden, the Lion Grove Garden has a lot of buildings scattered throughout the garden. My favorite building is the "Ask the Plums Pavilion." There are plum trees right outside the pavilion. When I first heard the name, I thought it sounded absurd -- why would you ask a plum anything? It turns out that the name refers to a famous saying in Zen Buddhism. Do you remember when I introduced Buddhism to you after my trip to Hong Kong? Zen is a particular kind of Buddhism common in East Asia, including China, Korea, and Japan. Practitioners of Zen Buddhism spend a lot of time contemplating deep philosophical questions and then asking those questions to other Buddhists. The story is told of a Buddhist named Ma Zu who had a friend named Mei, and he spent a lot of time asking Mei important questions. The name Mei sounds the same as the Chinese word for "plum" (梅, pronounced "mei"). So the "Ask the Plums Pavilion" is a humorous homage to the wisdom of an old Zen Buddhist sage named Mei.

I'm ready to talk to some plums.

I really liked learning about the gardens of Suzhou. Not only are they very beautiful and very relaxing, but I was impressed at how different the two gardens I visited were. There are lots more gardens in Suzhou, most of them much smaller than these two, and I am told that every garden was built in a unique style. I would like to design a Chinese garden for myself, but I travel too much, and I wouldn't be able to water the plants when I am away.

--Benny