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. 

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. 

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.