Ninth in a series
All images by Greg Gross and property of I’m Black and I Travel unless otherwise identified. All rights reserved.
Suzhou and Tongli are about a couple hours’ drive outside of Shanghai. Together, they offer a look back in time into Chinese life as it was, and still is.
I love big cities, so you know I had to see Shanghai. Bigger than Beijing. A forest of skyscrapers, a haven for cutting-edge architecture. Lakes and rivers of neon. Populated by 17 million hustlers, working and grinding toward what is becoming The Chinese Dream.
After awhile, though, there does come a point when a city seems to be just a city, where one metropolis seems to be pretty much like another. Differences exist, but they seem almost too subtle to matter.
And when you’re in a country on the other side of the world, one that can trace its history back five millenia, you wish you could go to a place where you could get a sense of how people lived before the arrival of high-rises, gridlock traffic and maglev trains.
Drive a couple of hours west-northwest from Shanghai, a little ways off the Shanghai-Nanjing Expressway, and you’ll get your wish.
Unlike mountainous Beijing, the Shanghai region sits in a vast river delta formed by the Yangtze and smaller rivers, flat as a table. Its dominant physical feature, Tai Hu, is a lake large enough to swallow the city of Shanghai more or less in one gulp.
Indeed, water is everything here.
SUZHOU
The city of Suzhou is some 2,500 years old, a center of culture of the Wu people (the dominant ethnic group in China is the Han). It has its own ultra-modern skyscraper and all that — that’s not what you come here for.
If you’re a shopper, you come here for the silk — and if you’re part of an organized tour, it’s almost a given that you’ll be brought to the No. 1 Silk Factory for just that purpose.
You’ll get to see silk being made, a process that has made few concession to modern industry over the centuries.
But the traveler in you who wants a taste of that more traditional Chinese life will come here for the gardens. Its classic Chinese gardens, like the one you see above, are listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
You won’t need to be told why. You won’t even need translations. Your own eyes will tell you everything.
These are not the towering, sprawling, stone-dominated temples of Beijing. You can explore these garden in their entirety in a matter of minutes.
If you can, though, go slower…much slower.
Where Beijing’s imposing palaces were meant to intimidate foreigners and commoners — and even confuse would-be assassins — Suzhou’s classic gardens encourage you to reflect, contemplate, slow your roll.
Stroll the quiet grounds long enough, or find a place to sit in the serenity, and you may even feel your breathing start to slow down.
Did you ever wonder why traditional Chinese gardens featured huge, round windows or doors? Found out it’s because the people who designed these gardens wanted to treat every window, every door, every wall like a picture frame.
The “painting” is the garden itself.
If you were a successful scholar or business type, this was how you lived in ancient China.
Even getting to the garden you see above is a walk backward through time.
When you descend from your tour bus, you’re on a modern, bustling commercial street. Within ten steps, you’re zig-zagging through a maze of gray, narrow alleys, alert for the scooters and motorbikes edging by you in either direction, barely slowing down along the way.
A zig here, a zag there, and you’re suddenly back in the 11th century. No roaring engines, no honking horns, no gaggles of vendors shouting and touting their wares. Just peace.
Not the worst way to live, even if modern life would seem to disagree.
TONGLI
China calls this place its Venice of the East.
Canals lined by stone footpaths and houses centuries old. Gondolas, rowed here by women instead of men. Low bridges overhead.
Captive cormorants, used by local fishermen to catch fish, resting on the gunwales of rowboats.
At the foot of the steps leading down from the footpaths to the canal, you see a woman squatting over the water with a plastic colander. She looks like she’s washing clothes, but she’s not.
She’s fishing.
And when you peek into her basket, you realize…she’s catching. This green plastic basket is her net, and she’s got lots of little fish in it.
Here too, you find ancient, placid gardens done in traditional Chinese style, as well as a small museum devoted to Chinese wedding traditions.
But for me, the main attraction of Tongli is Tongli itself. Cruising the canals. Sitting on a stone bench in the central square and watching daily life go by…slowly, quietly.
Traffic is mainly scooters and bikes, motorized and not. Your taxi is a pedicab, or maybe something that looks like a stretched golf cart.
Streetside stands sell roasted ducks that hang suspended in storefront windows, reminiscent of a dozen different Chinatowns across America and elsewhere.
Bakers whip out small, flat, savory pastries with machine-like precision. Buttery and studded with sesame seeds, they’re sold by the bag-full for some ridiculously small amount of Chinese money, known as yuan or RMB short for renminbi.
Our group moves so fast and so constantly that I don’t even have time to ask what they’re called. What I can tell you is: They’re delicious.
Tongli does make some concessions to modern life, but not many, and then, it seems, only grudgingly. For me, that’s a major part of its charm. It was as if we were being treated to pieces of culture, tidbits of history, slices of time.
When you’ve only got three days to visit one of the great cities of the world, committing a whole day to side trips like Suzhou and Tongli is both a risk and a tradeoff. I could’ve seen and done a lot more in Shanghai with that extra day, but I would’ve felt seriously deprived had I missed out on those two small glimpses into traditional Chinese life.
Oh well, you can always go back, right?
ALSO CHECK OUT:
IBIT in CHINA:An introduction
IBIT in CHINA: Beijing
IBIT in CHINA: The Wall and The Way
IBIT in CHINA: All is vanity
IBIT in CHINA: Shanghai
IBIT in CHINA: Tough history, tough people
IBIT in CHINA: The world’s fastest train