Places we guide
What is actually at each of these, what a ticket covers, which day of the week to avoid, and how long to allow.
These are written from the notes our guides work from, so the awkward details are in them — the garden you have to book under your own name a week ahead, the museums that shut on Mondays, the ticket you do not need to buy twice.
The Bund
外滩
A mile of banks and trading houses on the west bank of the Huangpu, none of which existed before 1842, facing a skyline where nothing is older than 1990.
Read the guideThe Humble Administrator's Garden
拙政园
The largest of the Suzhou gardens, begun in 1509, and named after a joke a demoted official made about himself.
Read the guideThe Lion Grove Garden
狮子林
A fourteenth-century temple garden whose Taihu-rock hill is entered, climbed and lost inside rather than viewed from across a pond.
Read the guideThe Lingering Garden
留园
A Suzhou garden where halls, corridors and a single Taihu rock do as much of the work as the water.
Read the guideThe Master of the Nets Garden
网师园
A compact Suzhou house and garden in which four residential courts lead to a pool, pavilions and one separate courtyard that travelled to New York in adapted form.
Read the guideTiger Hill
虎丘
A thirty-four-metre hill outside Suzhou's old city carrying a tenth-century leaning pagoda, a narrow spring pool and more than a thousand years of inscriptions.
Read the guideShantang Street
山塘街
A canal road made under Bai Juyi in 825, running from Changmen toward Tiger Hill through a short visitor quarter and a much longer lived-in route.
Read the guidePingjiang Road
平江路
A street in Suzhou that still matches a city map carved into stone in 1229, with about eight thousand households living inside it.
Read the guideTongli Water Town
同里古镇
A canal town of seven islands an hour and a half from Shanghai, with forty-nine old bridges and a World Heritage garden inside it.
Read the guideJinxi Water Town
锦溪古镇
A canal town twenty minutes from Zhouzhuang that almost nobody goes to, arranged around a grave in the lake it was named after for 880 years.
Read the guide
Not sure which one?
The questions we answer most often, answered the way we would answer them in the car.
- When should you go to the Bund?There is no ticket and no gate, so the only decision left is the hour — and it changes what you can see more than anything else about the walk.
- Should you do Suzhou as a day trip from Shanghai?The train takes thirty minutes. The journey does not, and the difference is what decides whether the day works.
- How many days should you spend in Suzhou?One day is enough when Suzhou is the contrast inside a Shanghai trip. Two days are for the person who wants to stop treating the gardens and water towns as things to fit around each other.
- Which water town near Shanghai should you go to?They are all about ninety minutes out and some are twenty minutes from each other, so distance is not the thing that decides it.
- Which Suzhou garden should you visit?Nine of them are on the UNESCO list, they are all within a short ride of each other, and two is the number that fits in a day.
We guide all of these privately, one party at a time, with a car and driver for the day.
See private tours