Suzhou (pronounced "SU-jo") was the most beautiful city we
saw. It is called the "Venice of the East" because of its canals,
and it features large gardens throughout the city. We stayed in the Suzhou
Garden Hotel, where each room looks out on a garden.
The koi pond next to the hotel dining room.
Off to one of the main historical gardens, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
These garden stones are in a shape meant to represent fishing nets.
Every wall is a blank canvas, and they use painters as landscape designers.
These large rocks come from "rock farms". Local farmers would
quarry rock and place it in the lake, and future generations would harvest
them once the water had carved it into interesting forms.
Every garden must have mountain and sea, represented by rock and water.
Every window is a picture frame.
Here we are in the reception hall.
Our local guide Jong is from Suzhou. He took us to the best dinner we
had, and he had a definite love for his city.
Not everyone lives in the Hutong district or the Suzhou gardens. Local
apartment dwellers get 400 square feet at best, and build these cages
to create a small amount of storage area outside with their air conditioning
units.
A local maintenance worker.
It's shopping time again, this time at the silk factory. Here Jong (who
used to work as a machinery repairman in the silk factory) explains the
various stages of the silkworm's development.
Here are some of the little guys eating, eating, eating.
A small museum shows a 100-year-old weaving machine. A second operator
sits atop the machine and raises and lowers threads to make the pattern.
Sorting the cocoons. About 3% of the cocoons are saved back for laying
eggs for next year's crop. The remaining 97% are baked in an oven to kill
the larvae. The larvae have more protein than meat, and are sold for consumption,
mainly to Korea. The cocoons are sorted, and the misshapen and discolored
ones are filtered out. The ones that have twins in them are also filtered
out, and are used specially for creating quilting material.
Each cocoon is composed of exactly one thread. This operator finds the
start of that thread on each of nine cocoons, and feeds them into a winder.
It takes these nine threads to make one strand of silk.
One operator handles a dozen or two groups of nine.
These are the automatic weaving machines making fabric. It is still a
simple loom with a shuttle, but the shuttle is thrown back and forth by
machine, and a set of punched cards defines the threads that are pulled
up to make the pattern.
The double cocoons are stretched out to make quilts.
Wow, that's a lot harder than it looks.
One of the bridges over the canals.
In Tongli, a city that it supposed to represent what Suzhou looked like
thirty years ago. In the town square this is a performance of a play going
on.
Another of the garden sites. The Chinese invented what the Japanese popularized
as Bonsai.
Many gardens had second-story observation rooms.
More of the canals at Tongli.
Wade in his city safari gear. (Hey, I'm sensitive, OK?)
