Suzhou day trip time!! I’ve been looking forward to this day trip!
This morning was a bit of a high-wire time, because I had to leave the hotel, get on the metro to Shanghai Railway Station, book tickets on the high speed train to Suzhou on my phone while on the metro -and there are trains every ten or twenty minutes but I had to choose a time late enough for us to arrive on time but early enough that we wouldn’t miss our 12:00 entrance time at Suzhou museum- then get to the station and pass all the security checks and passport controls in time for our train, then get off the train at Suzhou (110 km and only 30 mins later), on to a Didi, then walk into the passport check at Suzhou museum with about 15 minutes to spare. Phew!
So! Suzhou! Once a prestigious and prosperous city that would later be eclipsed by the initially much smaller Shanghai, Suzhou is famous for its canals, its many Classical Chinese gardens, and starting this century, also the Suzhou Museum, which has become a must-see destination because of its collection of historical items but also because of its striking design helmed by IM Pei, the Chinese-American architect who designed the Louvre’s iconic pyramid at the promising young age of 72 (he designed the Suzhou Museum a little bit deeper into adulthood, at 89).
It is one of those museums where the tickets are free but you have to fight for them. You can book them through their WeChat mini app, which for once has an English version; the challenge is in finding any openings. When I checked on Tuesday, all week was fully booked except for this one-hour slot today.
Still, the experience is well worth it. I didn’t take many pictures because it was so crowded that it was impossible to really capture the aesthetic of the place, but the geometrical, white and gray design manages to evoke traditional Chinese houses while still looking like something entirely new.
It even has a beautiful garden, which reimagines Suzhou style gardens but all in sober straight lines. Whether in architecture, fashion, or graphic design, I love it when artists take an established concept and manage to make it their own, so you can see the original idea and their own vision simultaneously.
The shop at the museum was pretty good, too, with the caveat that if you want to browse you have to risk being trampled by a hundred people who physiologically cannot see you and will attempt to walk through you whenever possible.
There’s also a beautiful water fixture on a wall in the atrium, but it really doesn’t photograph well (I tried!). There’s something interesting about this place that looks gorgeous but makes it impossible to take pictures. Live in the moment!
After a quick break for lunch, it was time for the garden right next door! Suzhou has a ton of prestigious gardens, nine of which are UNESCO World Heritage sites (!). They have evocative names like The Lingering Garden, The Garden of the Master of the Nets, Lion’s Grove Garden… but the most famous one is The Humble Administrator’s Garden, built in the 16th century!
At 80 RMB (€10.50), the ticket is relatively expensive, but this too is worth it because the garden is huge and gorgeous. At three in the afternoon it was just as crowded as the museum, but it felt less oppressive because here people had more room to disperse (even if some of the narrow walkways got a bit dicey -I wonder how many hapless guests they have to fish out of the pond on an average day). Weirdly, a lot of people (and I mean A LOT a lot of people) were visiting the garden to take semi-professional photo shoots of themselves. Women were dressed in qipaos or hanfu of various time periods, face fully made up, hair done up, and were posing for pictures in every available corner of the garden. What is that about? What are the pictures for? (Also amazing: these girls put on a ton of makeup to try and look white. They put on foundation that is three shades too pale, paint on their lower eyelids, and even contour their nostrils within an inch of their life to make them seem narrower.)
Anyway, if you can abstract yourself from the masses -and if you’ve been traveling through China by the time you get here, you can- the garden makes for a beautiful walk. There are a lot of different sections and moods, to the degree that they make Yuyuan in Shanghai feel like a common courtyard in comparison. There are lots of small ponds in addition to the main one, several zigzagging bridges (gotta keep those ghosts at bay), and lots of little pavilions at ground level or elevated on top of small hills. I can imagine the rich family that built this garden deciding to have their afternoon tea on a different pavilion every day of the week. They also all have evocative names, like the Hall of Drifting Fragrance, the Dotted Cloud Peak, or the Pavilion to Listen to the Sound of Rain.
There are a lot of paths to follow, and even though there is a Main Route that is relatively well signaled, it’s still easy to get lost… which you should, because making a wrong turn almost always rewards you with a new unexpected sights. One such turn got us into a huge bonsai garden, by which I mean the bonsai garden was huge, but also the bonsais were huge, themselves. There comes a point where I looked at some of them and went “Okay, that’s a tree.”
There are also spacious halls dotted around the garden that are fully furnished in period furniture; some even had crickets chirping away in small wooden cages like the ones in Mulan. Most had lattice windows that had been smartly designed to showcase the view outside (my guidebook says there’s one window that displays the “borrowed view” of a pagoda from a temple outside, but I couldn’t find it).
Eventually, we had to resign ourselves to the fact that we had completed the tour of the garden, and walked out onto Pingjiang Road, the main old street in Suzhou. Here again the shops are all touristy souvenirs and street food (and crowds!), but it’s worth paying it a short visit just to see the canals the city is renowned for.
The ones in Pingjiang Road are all overtaken by tourist bars and restaurants, but if you turn a corner to walk perpendicularly to the main avenue, you can see canals that look much like they must have before industrialization.
That was it for Suzhou! Nothing left but to take the metro back, buy tickets for the high speed train back to Shanghai from the metro, then again cross the station and back to Shanghai.
But that was not it for our day, because I had special plans for dinner! As regular readers will know, when I am in Tokyo I like to say goodbye on my last night from the Park Hyatt’s bar from Lost in Translation, and I have since done that in places like Bangkok too. This time I booked dinner at the 100 Century Avenue Cantonese, which happens to be at the Park Hyatt too, which itself happens to be on the 91st floor of the World Financial Center, the tower that looks like a bottle opener (I could swear there’s a tower that looks like that in Nashville too?).
Getting off the metro and onto the Pudong streets at night is an experience in itself. I felt immediately dwarfed by the incomprehensible tall towers all around me, all with their respective lighting fixtures. The Oriental Pearl looks even more imposing, and the Jinmao tower can’t even be seen in one glance it’s so tall. My brain can’t handle the scale of what my eyes are seeing!
Dinner at the 100 Century Avenue was another great experience. I had requested a table by the window, which made it quite reminiscent of the Tokyo Park Hyatt, with an incredible view of the city below, night lights stretching out as far as the eye can see.
The food was amazing, highlighting Cantonese cuisine: we had a wagyu beef stir fry, crispy cod, and slow-cooked pork ribs. I ordered Guangzhou tea, which was earthy and rich but not as bitter as black tea.
On the way out, we made sure to duck into the Steakhouse (the other half of the restaurant) to gawk at the view from the other side, which lets you look down at the Oriental Pearl from above! The colonial buildings from the Bund looked like miniature models from up there.
Between the delicious food and the stunning views, I couldn’t have hoped for a better farewell to Shanghai and to China!
