Three days in Suzhou: gardens built by officials who walked out on the court
Two nights in the old town: a canal street and a small perfect garden on arrival, the big three the next morning, and a pagoda above a canal walk before the train.
- Length
- 3 days, 2 nights
- Where you stay
- Suzhou
- Places
- 8 across 3 days
Suzhou made its money on silk and spent it on gardens. Not public parks: private walled compounds built by retired officials, merchants and scholars who had had enough of the imperial court and wanted a landscape they could control, about half a hectare at a time.
Nine of them are on the world heritage list, and the trick is not to see all nine. They use the same vocabulary of rocks, water, whitewashed walls and framed windows, and by the fifth one in a day you stop seeing any of it. Four, spread over three days, is the right dose.
The rest of the time goes on the canals. Suzhou was laid out on a grid of waterways in the sixth century BC and enough of it survives that you can still walk a stone street with a canal on one side and somebody's washing over it.
Highlights
- The Garden of the Master of the Nets, tiny, and the most perfectly judged thing in the city
- The Humble Administrator's Garden at opening, before it becomes the busiest garden in China
- Pingjiang Road, a thousand year old waterside lane that people still live on
- The museum I M Pei came out of retirement to design, next door to a garden his relatives once owned
- The Tiger Hill pagoda, out of true by more than two metres and still standing after a thousand years
Where to stay
Suzhou, two nights
Stay inside the old town, ideally near Pingjiang Road or Guanqian Street. The gardens are then a walk rather than a taxi, and the canal lanes are best in the evening when the day visitors from Shanghai have gone.
The Suzhou Industrial Park to the east is where the modern hotels and the skyline are. It is efficient and it is twenty minutes from everything you came to see.
Day by day
Day 1 in Suzhou
A canal street, a temple full of smoke, and one small garden
Start with the water rather than the gardens. Pingjiang Road runs north to south beside a canal on stone slabs that have been there a thousand years, and it is the most convincing surviving piece of the old grid.
Cut west into the middle of town for the Taoist hall, which sits behind a market and is a working temple rather than a monument, and then south to a garden most visitors miss.
The Master of the Nets is the one to see first because it is the smallest. Understand how much a Suzhou garden can do in a courtyard or two and the big ones make more sense tomorrow.
- 15:00
Ping Jiang Road
OtherA canal street of hand cut stone with houses, tea shops and bridges along it, still lived in rather than converted end to end. Walk it slowly and go up the side lanes, which are where the laundry and the mahjong are.
- 17:00
Temple of Mystery
ReligiousA Taoist hall founded in the third century, standing behind a busy market square and permanently hazy with incense. The main hall is one of the largest surviving Song dynasty timber structures in the region.
- 18:30
The Garden of the Master of the Nets
NatureFounded in 1140 and remade in 1770, and the most perfectly proportioned garden in the city. Half a hectare, with a house attached, arranged so that no two windows show the same view. Small enough to do twice, which is the right way to do it.
With more time: In summer the Master of the Nets opens again after dark for short performances of Kunqu opera and pipa music in the courtyards, which is a better use of an evening than dinner.
Day 2 in Suzhou
The big garden, the rock maze, and a museum by a local boy
Three of Suzhou's best known sights sit within two hundred metres of each other in the northeast corner, which makes for an efficient morning and a crowded one. Book the first slot at the Humble Administrator's Garden and be at the gate for it.
The name is a joke at the owner's expense. A censor forced out of office in the 1510s spent sixteen years and a fortune building it, then his son lost the whole thing in a single night of gambling.
Next door, Lion Grove is essentially a maze of eroded Taihu rocks that children love and adults get lost in, and beside that is the city museum, designed by the most famous architect Suzhou ever produced.
- 08:00
The Humble Administrator's Garden
NatureThe largest of the classical gardens and the one everybody comes for, five hectares of ponds, pavilions and island walks. Timed tickets, capped numbers, and a completely different experience before nine than after ten.
- 11:00
Lion Grove Garden
NatureOnce part of a Buddhist monastery and now best known for its rockery, a labyrinth of pitted limestone from Lake Tai that you can climb into and lose your sense of direction in. Deliberately disorienting, and much more fun than that sounds.
- 14:00
Suzhou Museum
CultureI M Pei designed this in his eighties for the city his family came from, in white walls, grey trim and glass, on a site next to a garden they used to own. The collection is small and beautifully lit, and the building is the exhibit. Free, and book ahead.
With more time: The Lingering Garden, twenty minutes west, is the fourth of the great gardens and much quieter than these three, with a covered walkway of seven hundred metres running through it.
Day 3 in Suzhou
The canal to Tiger Hill, and a pagoda that leans
Shantang Street runs three and a half kilometres northwest from the old city gate to Tiger Hill, following a canal dug in the ninth century by the poet who was then the local governor.
The first few hundred metres are restored and full of souvenir shops. Keep walking. Past that it becomes an ordinary residential canal lane, with laundry, bridges and old women washing vegetables in the water.
Tiger Hill at the end has the pagoda, which has been leaning for four hundred years and was underpinned in the 1980s so that it could go on doing it. The station is fifteen minutes away by taxi, so this works before an afternoon train.
- 08:30
Shantang Street
OtherA canal street running northwest from Changmen gate towards Tiger Hill. Crowded and commercial at the southern end, genuinely residential once you get past it. Walk as far as the shops stop, then take the boat or a taxi the rest of the way.
- 11:00
Tiger Hill Pagoda
ArchitectureA forty eight metre brick pagoda of seven storeys and eight sides, built in the tenth century on a hill above the canal and visibly out of true. The temple below it burned; the pagoda, improbably, did not.
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With more time: Panmen, on the southwest corner of the old moat, is the last surviving combined land and water gate of the city walls and takes half an hour if you have one before the train.
Before you go
Getting there and around
High speed trains from Shanghai take twenty five to thirty minutes and run constantly. Suzhou station is on the north edge of the old town and the metro runs from underneath it.
The old town is small, about three kilometres across, and flat. Walking is the right way to see it; the metro handles the longer hops out to Tiger Hill and the lake.
Boats run on the outer moat and on the Shantang canal. They are touristy and they are also the only way to see the water gates from the water.
Garden tickets
The famous gardens charge separately and prices roughly double in high season. Buy online with a passport number, especially for the Humble Administrator's Garden, which caps daily numbers and sells out.
Go at opening or in the last two hours. Between ten and three the popular gardens are full and the whole point of them, the framed views and the borrowed scenery, stops working when there are forty people in the frame.
Rain is good news. The gardens were designed with covered walkways and the rocks look better wet, so a drizzly morning is worth using rather than avoiding.
What to eat
Suzhou cooking is sweet, delicate and fish-heavy, and it is the opposite of Sichuan. Squirrel-shaped mandarin fish, sweet and sour and scored into a fan, is the set piece.
The everyday version is noodles in broth for breakfast, with the toppings ordered separately and laid on top. Aozao noodles are the local institution.
Biluochun, the local green tea, is picked in the hills by the lake in spring and is worth buying where it is grown rather than in a souvenir shop.
A Suzhou garden is a small argument about how to live. Build a wall, put a pond in the middle, arrange the rocks so that they suggest mountains, then cut a window so that a single branch appears in it, and you have made yourself a landscape you can walk around in twenty minutes.
The men who built them had mostly failed at, or given up on, something larger. That is worth remembering as you walk through: this is what the losing side of Chinese politics did with its retirement.
Make it your trip
Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.
Common questions
- How many gardens should I actually see?
- Four is plenty for three days. They share a design language, so the fifth one in a short trip teaches you nothing the first four did not. Pick one small (the Master of the Nets), one large (the Humble Administrator's), one odd (Lion Grove) and one quiet (the Lingering Garden), and spend the saved time on the canals.
- Is Suzhou a day trip from Shanghai?
- It can be, and it is a worse trip that way. Twenty five minutes on the train means the day visitors all arrive between ten and eleven, which is exactly when the gardens are unbearable. Staying two nights gives you the gardens at opening and the canal lanes in the evening, which is when Suzhou is at its best.
- What about the water towns?
- Tongli, Zhouzhuang and Luzhi are all within an hour and are prettier than anything in central Suzhou, and all three are also thoroughly commercialised. Tongli is the pick, partly for the Retreat and Reflection Garden. Add a night if you want one properly rather than as a coach stop.
- When should I visit?
- April and May, or late September to November. Spring gives blossom and the tea picking, autumn gives clear light and osmanthus. Summer is humid and the gardens offer little shade beyond their walkways.
- Can I change this plan?
- Yes. Copy it into the planner, swap a garden for one you would rather see, or add a night for a water town.