Suzhou
— — a city of gardens and old water.
Not only on a wall.
“A canal city in the lowlands of Jiangsu, about eighty kilometres west of Shanghai. The old town keeps its Song-era grid of stone bridges and water lanes; nine classical scholar gardens — Humble Administrator, Lingering, Master of the Nets — were placed on the UNESCO list between 1997 and 2000. Tiger Hill carries a brick pagoda that has leaned for a thousand years.
Suzhou, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Suzhou sits on the Yangtze River delta in Jiangsu province, about eighty kilometres west of Shanghai and connected to it by twenty-five-minute high-speed trains. The old city was founded around 514 BCE by the Wu kingdom and has held the same square plan ever since. The Grand Canal — begun in the seventh century and still the world's longest artificial waterway — runs along the eastern wall. The greater metropolitan population is roughly twelve million; the historic core inside the old moat holds about three hundred thousand.
Suzhou earned its old name 'Venice of the East' from the canals that still grid the old town. The Pingjiang historic street runs about 1.6 kilometres along one of the original Song-dynasty waterways, with stone arch bridges crossing every hundred metres. Wooden punt boats carry passengers under the bridges on the half hour. The water comes from Lake Tai west of the city, the third-largest freshwater lake in China, which feeds the canal system and the silk industry that has worked the same delta for two and a half thousand years.
The four most-visited classical gardens — Humble Administrator's, Lingering, Master of the Nets, and Lion Grove — sit within walking distance of one another in the northeast quarter of the old city. Tickets run roughly 70 to 90 yuan depending on season; the gardens open at 7:30 and close at 17:30. Tiger Hill, with its leaning brick pagoda completed in 961, sits a short bus ride northwest. High-speed trains from Shanghai Hongqiao reach Suzhou in twenty-five minutes and run every few minutes from dawn to dusk.