Detour
Suzhou is a place waiting to be rediscovered. Beneath a 20th-century layer of urban blight, overindustrialization and grime is a system of canals hardly changed since Marco Polo paid a visit back in 1276. Incorporating the existing settlement of Gusu, the city, 45 km west of Shanghai, took its present form about 500 years ago under Prince He Lu, who was banished by his rivals to the swamps of the Yangtze River delta. He drained the fecund marshes and built a walled city crisscrossed by a network of canals and encircled by a huge moat. Although sections of the moat can still be found near Suzhou's elegant bridges, the waterways have been besmirched almost beyond recognition.
Until now, that is: the city recently launched an ambitious effort to turn the clock back some 700 years to when Gusu was in its prime. Architect I.M. Pei, a native of Suzhou, is heading an advisory committee to oversee the restoration. The canals were imperiled in 1990 when the massive Grand Canal, just west of Suzhou, was expanded to facilitate increased inland shipping from Beijing to Shanghai. Fighting back, the city once known as "Venice of the East" last year dredged the sludge from the canals and pumped in fresh water from nearby Lake Taihu. Suzhou's well-preserved glories include its numerous gardens. The Garden of the Master of the Fishing Nets, built in 1140, is the smallest of the city's formal gardens and certainly one of the most charming. Another of Suzhou's landscaped gems is the Lion's Grove garden, the ancestral home of I.M. Pei's family. The Peis repurchased the property in the 1980s, and it has since become a major tourist attraction. Pei has long credited Suzhou as an important influence on his style, particularly the way in which locals place large rocks in rivers, to be sculpted naturally by flowing water and the hands of time.
--James Irwin
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May 31, 1999
Short Cuts The Singapore Arts Festival kicks off with Asian percussion, folk and tribal beats
Off The Shelf The 50 authors assembled in Worst Journeys have relived their hellacious trips in writing
Web Crawling Meet the team that recently discovered the body of George Mallory
Detour Suzhou is a place waiting to be rediscovered
Main Feature The travel industry's new task forces and initiatives to combat child-sex tourism
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