While sightseeing in China you can occasionally hear tour guides pointing out a rock formation, or garden design and reminding their Western tourist charges that ‘in China, you must look not only with your eyes, but with your mind and heart. At least 70% of what you see is in your imagination.’
Maybe still a bit jetlagged, we got up at a leisurely hour and, after a breakfast of noodles and dumplings at “easygood” a local fast food chain (they were, indeed, easygood), we made our way to the metro and then bus station to take a jaunt to Suzhou. Only a couple of hours outside of Shanghai, the city is famous for its gardens and comes highly recommended, so it seemed worth a look.
Orienting yourself after emerging from a subway station is often difficult, more so when the signs outside aren’t in any language you can read. We struggled to make our way to a ticket office and wound up getting bus tickets just a few minutes before it was about to leave (not that we had seen a schedule before hand), and finding the bus before it actually left.
We were feeling pretty full of ourselves for navigating this far without a hitch. Suzhou is popular with Chinese tourists so, right along with them, we were mobbed upon our arrival by taxi drivers offering to take us to a garden for 20 RMB and others offering a variety of tourist maps (only in Chinese). The map in the guidebook showed at least one of the more interesting gardens at less than 2 km from the bus station, so paying a cab driver almost as much as it cost to drive an hour and a half in a bus just didn’t seem fair. Silly trade-off, of course. If you know where you’re going, 2 km isn’t very far. We didn’t actually get lost on the way to the garden, but it sure felt that way for the better part of an hour it took to make the short walk.
Zhuozheng (Humble Administrator’s) Garden was initially a private garden, completed during the Ming dynasty (1368 – 1644), and is well preserved today. Unlike classical gardens in Europe or naturalistic gardens of England, Chinese gardens were designed to be lived in and are comprised not only of plants and water features, but also rockeries and a multitude of buildings, halls, bridges and arbors. The garden isn’t nearly as large as the palace gardens of Europe, but much more densely packed. Chinese garden designs revel in a heightened aesthetic of the natural world. Zig-zagging bridges cross over meandering streams which empty into tiny lakes filled with koi and gold-fish. Everything looks like a classic silk painting of a natural scene available in the shops just outside the garden walls, except, it ends up looking as if it were built by architects who, using those paintings as a guide, had, alas, never actually seen nature itself. Nothing is really as one might experience it in the real world.
