Suzhou Canals

Beautiful Su contains about 50 photo images; had space permitted, I could easily have included hundreds from among the several thousand I've taken over the years. Since the Internet offers an effectively unlimited space, I thought I would use this blog periodically to extend my presentation of Suzhou's history, sites, and scenery beyond that possible in my book.

Since Suzhou has historically been best known to Westerners as a canal city (the proverbial but somewhat condescending "Venice of the Orient"), I decided to start by presenting some of my favorite canal-scene photos. The number of canals within the city limits is not what it once was, but these photos will hopefully provide a sense of just how integral water transport has been in the history of Suzhou and the surrounding area.

Watery back yard

Overhanging trees, quiet waters.

 

Tiger Hill pagoda from a nearby neighborhood.

"Reflections."

Barges on the Grand Canal - alongside the Suzhou New District.

Sunset over a canal.

 

A canal in the Suzhou Industrial Park.

Xumen pedestrian bridge with shoreside willows.

Along the Shantang Street canal.

Canal alongside a modern New District apartment complex.

"Water snake."

Parked rowboat.

Sundown and back home.

Water colors?

Along Shantang Canal.

Pavilion and bridges.

"Houses pillowed on embankments."

Wide waters, busy road.

The Story of a Suzhou Courtesan

Last month (September 2015) saw the release of The Courtesan, by Alexandra Curry. The book is a historical novel, essentially a fictionalized account of the life of the Suzhou courtesan known to history as Sai Jinhua. I haven't yet read Ms. Curry's book, but I have already purchased a copy and will certainly be reading it shortly.

I wrote about Sai Jinhua in Beautiful Su (Chapter 8, pp. 282 - 283). Born Zhao Caiyun in Suzhou in the waning years of the Qing Dynasty (1874, to be specific), Zhao was sold at age thirteen into concubinage to Hong Jun, a government official thirty-four years her senior. Following her husband's sudden, premature death after just six years of marriage, she relocated to Shanghai, changed her name to Sai Jinhua (variously translated as Golden Flower or Golden Lily), and rose to fame as the madame of a high-class brothel. Her earlier travels to Europe with her diplomat husband Hong Jun had brought her into contact with Europeans who marveled at her beauty and her reputed facility with foreign languages. Historical legend has it that Sai Jinhua was later instrumental in Beijing in negotiations with the Western "Eight Powers" over compensation for losses associated with the Boxer Rebellion; some of the legends claim some rather prurient behavior on Sai's part.

Surprisingly for a work of fiction, Ms. Curry has provided a bibliographic list of sources; understandably for a novel, there are no photos. As a supplement to her novel, I offer below a few pictures I took in Suzhou at the former home and now family museum-house of Sai Jinhua's first husband, Hong Jun; the residence is located at #29 Xuanqiao Xiang (Xuan Qiao Alley) in Suzhou's old-city area, about a block west of Pingjiang Road.

 Pingjiang District plaque outside the residence

 Informational sign at the residence entrance.

 Interior courtyard -- entrance to the Sai Jinhua "museum" is on the right.

Photo of Sai Jinhua on display in the Hong family museum.

 Another photo - this one labeled "Sai Jinhua and her sisters."

Photo of Sai Jinhua from a Chinese language work on display.

The courtyard entrance as seen from the lane outside. 

The small blue sign on the upper left of the door displays the residence address.

A Suzhou City historical information sign for Xuanqiao Xiang. 

Similar signs are scattered throughout the old city at the heads of many of the smaller lanes. This sign mentions Hong Jun's former home and notes that he was a zhuangyuan, one of Suzhou's many number one (highest ranked) finishers in the imperial civil service examinations.

The Suzhou Milieu - Video of "Taihu Mei"

One of the most difficult aspects of Suzhou to convey is its milieu, the refined, graceful, almost effeminate atmosphere that characterized the city's daily life for centuries. Words, however well-expressed, are inadequate to the task; paintings and photographs help, but they still fall well short, only hinting at what lies beneath. Even visiting the city is all too often just superficial, with tourists simply being rushed from one classical garden to the next in a whirl of confused images and insufficient context. Seeing a pingtan or Kunqu opera performance is a start, but by themselves these shows are just too foreign and obscure for most people to absorb.

Having struggled with this problem of "conveyance" for some time now, I've concluded that the best method currently available is a promotional video produced under the auspices of the city of Suzhou (presumably by a tourism office) somewhere back around the year 2006. Set to the softly flowing music of "Taihu mei" ("Beautiful Tai Lake"), this four-minute video (below) probably captures the spirit of classical Suzhou as well as anything I've seen before or since.

This spirit is increasingly difficult to find in rapidly modernizing Suzhou, but it's still present if one has the patience and willingness to look for it.

If the video above does not play or you wish to find it on YouTube, click here.

Why a 2,500-Year History of Suzhou, China Is Relevant

One of the factors that motivated me to tell the story of a 2,500-year-old Chinese city was the gradual realization that I was discovering (for myself, at least) a much broader story about greater China. And not just about the Chinese empire’s history and culture, but explanations for many characteristics and behaviors of China as a twenty-first-century global power.  

Just as America today is a clear product of its careening, four-hundred-year past, so too, present-day China bears the burdens of a much longer, and far more fractious and tear-stained, history. “Study the past if you would define the future,” Confucius wrote in the Analects, and so it is that any understanding of modern China on the global economic and geopolitical stage demands an understanding of its past.

Suzhou was never the imperial capital, never the home of emperors, never a seat of military power beyond the city’s first few founding decades some twenty-five centuries ago.  Yet culturally, commercially, intellectually, and aesthetically, it could be viewed as the beating heart of the Chinese empire’s corpus for nearly the entire millennium just past. Suzhou’s past is thus China’s past, or at least a highly informative mirror of that broader past, and consequently provides numerous insights into today’s (and, likely, tomorrow’s) China.

For example, the story of Suzhou sheds helpful light on the inordinate Chinese attention to education, on the university admissions system (their infamous, three-day-long, one-shot-only version of the SAT called the gaokao), and on the current predilection for the very highest levels of government to be populated so heavily by technocrats, predominantly individuals with engineering backgrounds. The same history helps explain the long-standing desire of so many for civil service and similar official positions, the benefits derived therefrom, the predilection for top-down internal control, and the difficulty of imposing centrally issued directives on a widespread bureaucracy. Suzhou’s story also yields a better understanding of China’s attitude toward the Western world, its periodic introversion, its deep distrust of cult religions and their charismatic leaders, and its anathema toward any forms of social unrest and organized protest. National characteristics like the ones above are just a handful of those whose rationale can be better grasped through the story of Suzhou’s long, nationally meaningful history.

The usual pathways to China’s daunting past are weighty tomes filled with endless accounts of Emperor This and General That, Invaders Them and Battled There, nearly always centered on palace intrigues and succession disputes at the empire’s various seats of government over the centuries. Beautiful Su offers a refreshingly different approach, static in a place that was evolving, thriving, and suffering over time with the rest of the nation. Chinese life and history can be seen as lived, not simply viewed from 30,000 feet as some abstract exercise of realpolitik. 

Beautiful Su Is Now Available on Amazon!

Exciting news!

Beautiful Su is now available online at Amazon.com. The official publication date is August 1, 2015. As of this posting, only the print book (soft cover) is available for purchase, with a Kindle version expected in the next week or two.

Click here to be linked directly to the Amazon book page. Thanks to all who are interested -- posted reviews on Amazon are both welcomed and much appreciated.

Old Photos from "Beautiful Soo"

It took me quite a while to track down Hampdon DuBose's Beautiful Soo pamphlet, but I ultimately found a copy of the second edition (1911) at a reasonable price from a UK seller. Haven't seen any others for sale since, and that was almost four years ago now.

Since there's a limit on the photos I can include in Beautiful Su, I thought I'd post copies of some of the century-old photos contained in DuBose's version. Many of the pictures are as fascinating for the surroundings as they are for the objects of the photographer's interest. I will periodically post on this blog Suzhou-related pictures of all sorts and from all recent eras and multiple sources, including many I've taken myself. For now, here are a few from 1911, courtesy of Kelly & Walsh publishers of Shanghai.

 One of my favorites, showing the quiet then surrounding Tiger Hill. 

A nice view of the crenellated city wall, a tower, and a water gate.

Unmistakably Bao Dai Qiao, the 53-arch Precious Belt Bridge. 

The nine-arch, Xingchun Bridge at the south end of Shihu, Stone Lake.

Ruiguang Pagoda standing in solitude in what is now Panmen Gate park. 

The Ink Pagoda with memorial hall standing in what is now the Suzhou University campus.

Changmen (water) Gate as it looked in the early 1900s. 

The entrance bridge to Surging Waves Pavilion, not terribly different than it looks today. 

The towering North Temple Pagoda of 1911; there's no canal there today. 

Two Reasons for the "Beautiful Su" Title

      

Sometimes it seems as though the title choice for a book is as important than what's inside. Consider how iconic some book titles have become: To Kill a Mockingbird, Ulysses, The Jungle, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Silent Spring, and Gone with the Wind, for example. Not that I aspire to such heights (well, not realistically, anyway), but the cultural ubiquity of such renowned titles made me conscious of a title's role as metaphorical shorthand for its book's content and meaning.

As I wrote and revised Beautiful Su, I occasionally thought about prospective titles. Given that Westerners would generally not know what a "Suzhou" was, or even that it was associated with China, an explanatory subtitle would be essential. Nevertheless, a short but meaningful main title was still called for. How was I going to capture 2,500 years of history and culture for a famed city in just a few words and still make it meaningful, or even comprehensible? So many possibilities just seemed so mundane.

I stumbled across the answer one day while writing about Hampden C. DuBose, a Presbyterian minister who spent most of his and his family's life in Suzhou. In 1888, after his first sixteen years there, DuBose penned a series of three linked articles about the city -- all titled "Soochow: The Capital of Kiangsu" -- for the The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal. His series went to some length attempting to introduce Suzhou's long history and esteemed culture to a Western readership, achieving one of the more comprehensive efforts to that date.

Sensing an opportunity as more and more Westerners flocked to turn-of-the-century China, Shanghai publisher Kelly & Walsh engaged DuBose to update and extend his Chinese Recorder articles into an 1899 pamphlet-cum-travel-guide under the title "Beautiful Soo": The Capital of Kiangsu. In 1911, Kelly & Walsh released a second and final (and regrettably posthumous) edition of DuBose's work, revised and updated by the author under the more pragmatic title "Beautiful Soo": A Handbook to Soochow, the Capital of Kiangsu. Prefaced with ads by the likes of Tsingtao Beer, Shanghai's Astor Hotel, and Soochow's Village Inn, generously supplied with photographs of Soochow sites and scenes, and accompanied by a foldout city map, the 80-page booklet closes with a congratulatory message to the city as it embarked on its twenty-fifth century "…with the wisdom of mature years, and the vigor of young manhood…." Little could DuBose have known what that next century would bring.

It seemed clear from the embedded quotation marks that the term "Beautiful Soo" held particular meaning for Reverend DuBose, and it finally dawned on me just what it might have been. The most famous adage attached to Suzhou states, in pinyin form, "Xiang you tian tang, xia you Su Hang," variously translated as "Above there is heaven, here below are Suzhou and Hangzhou." In Chinese poetic fashion, the characters for "Su Hang" were more than enough to signify the names of the two cities revered as heaven on earth, although DuBose would have spelled them "Soo Hang." His "Beautiful Soo" was not only a personal statement of his love for his adopted city, but also an allusion to the centuries-old adage by which Suzhou was best known.

At that point, the choice of title was easy. Beautiful Su was both my tip of the hat - a quiet homage - to Reverend DuBose and his pamphlet history of a century past and an acknowledgment of the Chinese people's longstanding assessment of Su (and Hang) as special places in their past, and still a "Beautiful Su" in their present.

Beautiful Su at Book Expo America (BEA)

Even though it was only presented in proof form, Beautiful Su received its first public introduction in the main booth of the China International Publishing Group (CIPG) at the just-finished Book Exposition America (BEA) at the Javits Center, May 28 - May 30. My publisher, China Books, is a subsidiary of CIPG and one of two American-based divisions (with Long River Press) that focus on books about Chinese history and culture intended for an American/Western readership.

This year's BEA featured the People's Republic of China as the guest of honor at the show's Global Market Forum, so there was special interest among visitors in books about China, particularly if they are written in English. A number of visitors stopped by to browse the China Books and Long River displays, and a number of them expressed interest in knowing when Beautiful Su would be available for purchase.

More work to do in the next few weeks: review the proof, decide on photo placements, make last-minute corrections and updates, add a reference to this blog site, and complete the topics list for the indexer. Hopefully, the published version will be available (and on Amazon, etc.) in another month or so.

The lead picture above is me with a copy of Beautiful Su and Executive Editor Chris Robyn with a copy of my first "China book," a memoir of my Suzhou experiences from 2001 - 2006 titled China, Heart and Soul. A few more captioned BEA photos follow below.

On the rack!

It's good to share with others!

With Mr. Wang Xin, President, Sinomedia International Group

Lots of activity at our CIPG booth

Lovely central display for Chinese publishing contingent

Why I Wrote Beautiful Su

I would never have written this book if someone had already done it, but such was not the case. I spent a great deal of time in Suzhou between 2001 and 2006, and every day brought more and more familiarity with the city, from its waterways and narrow, labyrinthine lanes and its famed classical gardens and historical landmarks.

During my earliest years in Suzhou, I served as a visiting English language teacher at No. 2 Senior Middle School (i.e., High School) and then at No. 26 Middle School. Both positions were arranged by Mr. Xu Lei, an Assistant Principal at No. 2 and Principal at No. 26. It was Xu Lei who insisted that for as many of my weekly appearances as possible, members of his English language teaching staff should accompany me on outings to local sites of interest. Thus it was that I became increasingly familiar with Suzhou's history, primarily through excursions to its World Heritage Gardens but as well through visits to other schools and even a boat tour around the canal that once stood as the city's defensive moat.

The more cultural and historical tidbits I acquired, the more I felt emboldened to explore on my own or seek out other sites with Ping Ping's (my Suzhounese wife's) assistance. I also became increasingly interested to learn about the city's history, but repeated trips to the local (Xinhua) book store and even the Foreign Languages Bookstore yielded little more than tourist-oriented picture books and an occasional, very spotty work purporting to tell that story, usually in badly mangled English. Searches on Amazon, Google, and the like turned up several books, each focusing on specific aspects of Suzhou's history: economic development during the Ming Dynasty, urban transformation in the late Qing and early Republican era, urban form over time, the role of connoisseurship among the literati scholar class of the Ming Dynasty. All were rather academic, and none provided the sort of end-to-end historical tale I had hoped to find.

By 2006 or 2007, I had pretty much made up my mind. I knew enough to know that Suzhou was a special city, renowned in China but virtually unknown to Westerners. A fascinating story was just waiting to be told, and Westerners needed to know that when they traveled to China, there was a marvelous cultural experience available to them just fifty miles--a thirty-minute high-speed train ride--from Shanghai. Thus began an eight-year period of intensive research and learning, more site visits, and lots of writing and rewriting. The more I learned, the more convinced I was that Suzhou's was a story worth telling, and a story worth hearing. The result is this book, Beautiful Su.

At this writing, Beautiful Su is still in preparation for final publication. Here's a look at the preliminary draft of the front and back cover.

My plan for this blog is to supplement the book's content - perhaps with content not included in the book, or new, updated, or corrected information as I learn it, or photos or links to other useful websites.  My goal remains unchanged: to tell a remarkable, cultural-rich story of a famous Chinese city in a way that engages a Western reading audience as thoroughly as the city itself has engaged me.