Suzhou, gardens built like poems

Suzhou has been a city of water and silk for two and a half thousand years, laid out on a grid of canals off the Grand Canal, and its scholar-officials spent their retirements building the gardens that now carry UNESCO status. The largest is the Humble Administrator's Garden, five hectares of ponds, zigzag bridges and borrowed views where a sixteenth-century censor turned political disgrace into landscape. The Lingering Garden is famous for its corridors and for the Cloud-Capped Peak, a contorted Taihu rock, while the tiny Master of the Nets Garden proves the point better than any of them: half a hectare that feels endless, best in the evening when Kunqu opera is performed in its halls.

Outside the walls, life still runs along the water. Walk Pingjiang Road at dawn, when the whitewashed houses and stone bridges belong to residents rather than crowds, or take a boat down Shantang Street towards Tiger Hill, where a brick pagoda from 961 leans more than three degrees over the tomb of King Helü. Suzhou silk built the city's fortune: the Silk Museum traces it, and embroidery workshops still produce the double-sided su xiu pieces that take months to finish.

Eat squirrel-shaped mandarin fish in sweet-sour sauce, aozao noodles in a clear morning broth, and drink biluochun, the spiral green tea grown on Dongting hill by Lake Tai. I. M. Pei's Suzhou Museum, a white geometric echo of the old courtyards, sits right beside the gardens. Water towns like Tongli and Zhouzhuang are half an hour away, making Suzhou the gentlest stop on any wider tour of China.