I’d walked down to the river as I’d done on my first night in Suzhou. Again there was the dancing, the kids on rollerblades, the breeze and general gaiety. I’d spent another day exploring the city, trying to figure it out. It had canals, but it was no Venice. It had gardens, but not nearly as numerous as before. I’d not been disappointed by Suzhou in so far as it had failed to live up to expectations. It was just that those expectations hadn’t exactly been trounced by wondrousness in the meantime.

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Why do people go to Suzhou? I wasn’t planning on going myself until I got talked into it whilst I was in Nanjing. “It’s beautiful,” I was told. “You can see the canals and … there are lots of gardens.” I was skeptical.

Suzhou bills itself as the “Venice of the East,” a moniker my guidebook had referred to as a “hackneyed … chat-up line” that I was unlikely to fall for. It is a town, it continues, that has “had to contend with destruction of its heritage and its replacement with largely arbitrary chunks of modern architecture.” Though Marco Polo, everybody’s favourite China traveller, described it as “a very great and noble city … contain[ing] merchants of great wealth and an incalculable number of people.” He may have been writing seven hundred years before this 11th edition of my Lonely Planet China was printed, but I still didn’t know who to believe.

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