Pingjiang Road

The map, and why it matters

The Pingjiang Map is the oldest surviving stone-carved city map anywhere. The stele is 2.84 metres tall and 1.40 wide, drawn at roughly one to three thousand, and the original is in the Suzhou Stone Inscription Museum about a mile away.

It shows six main canals, hundreds of bridges, and a grid where water and road run together. Walking Pingjiang Road is walking a piece of that drawing at full size, which is a rarer thing than it sounds — most old street plans survive as a shape, not as a working street.

The Pingjiang River beside it is the fourth of the old city's four north-south canals, five to six metres wide, with eleven bridges between Nanyuan Bridge and Beihuayang Bridge.

What the houses are not telling you

White walls, grey tiles, and a door that says nothing about what is behind it. A Suzhou house shows the street a blank, and the wealth is inside, in a row of courtyards running far deeper than the frontage is wide.

Look at the houses across the canal instead. Their fronts are on the street and their backs are on the water, with stone steps down to it. Goods arrived by boat and people arrived on foot, at the same house.

The canal was the service entrance of the whole city — rice, bricks, coal and night soil all moved on water. That is how the old city could be this dense without carts in it.

Read the wall plaques as you go. The lanes are named after a person or a trade, and the names are the quickest history of the quarter available.

The examination, and what it built

Pan Shien, who lived from 1769 to 1854, took first place in the palace examination in 1793. His house is on Niujia Lane and is a museum now.

Suzhou produced twenty-six of the hundred and fourteen top-ranked graduates in the whole Qing dynasty, more than any other city. The examination was open to almost any man who could study, and Britain later copied the idea for its own civil service.

That is the reason the gardens exist. A city that produced officials produced retired officials, and a retired official built a garden. The examination made the money and the money built the walls you are walking between.

Pan Zuyin, a grandson, was the great collector of the family. He owned two enormous Zhou dynasty bronze cauldrons, which his family hid underground through the war. In 1951 his son's widow gave both to the state; one is still the treasure of the Shanghai Museum and the other went to Beijing in 1959.

Two men from one lane

Hong Jun came first in the examination in 1868 and from 1887 served as China's minister to Russia, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. In the entire history of the examinations he is the only top graduate who became a diplomat. He took a former courtesan, Sai Jinhua, with him to Berlin, and she became well known in society there; their story has been turned into novels, plays and films ever since.

Further up the same lane is the house where Gu Jiegang was born in 1893. He spent his career arguing that much of China's earliest recorded history was later invention.

One lane, two men. One carried the old order to Europe and the other took it apart from the inside.

Kunqu and pingtan, which both start here

Kunqu opera came out of this region and Suzhou was its centre. It goes back about six hundred years, which makes it older than opera in Europe, and Peking opera grew partly out of it. It was on UNESCO's very first intangible heritage list in 2001, ranked first on it.

Its museum is in a late Qing guild hall built by merchants from Shanxi. Stand under the stage canopy and look up: the domed ceiling is carved to throw the singer's voice back down into the room, and it works.

Pingtan is the other one, and it is not opera. It is two people telling a story, sung and spoken, in the Suzhou dialect. A single story could be serialised daily for a hundred performances or more, and people came every afternoon for months to hear one novel finished. It was radio before radio.

Both museums are free. Both close on Mondays.

The Couple's Retreat Garden

Shen Bingcheng bought the site in 1874 and finished rebuilding it two years later. It is the only Suzhou garden laid out as a pair: the house in the middle with a garden on each side. The east garden has a yellow-stone hill, heavy and blunt; the west is lighter, built with lake stones. The house between them is the point of the arrangement.

The name means ploughing in a pair, taken from the Analects, and it puns on couple. Shen retired here with his wife Yan Yonghua, who was a poet, and a line of hers is still carved on the wall: a fine couple lives in the paired garden.

Eight years later he went back into office. Almost all of these gardens are about a man saying he has stopped, and then not stopping.

UNESCO added it to the Suzhou gardens listing in 2000, three years after the first four went on. It is ticketed separately from the street.

What the street has been given

The quarter won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage conservation award in 2005 — the only street among that year's winners — and was named one of China's ten famous historical and cultural streets in 2009.

Streets like this were cleared in a lot of Chinese cities. This one was not, and people still live in it, which is the difference you are walking through.

Questions people ask