Garden of the Master of the Nets

Suzhou

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June 10th 2008
Took a high-speed train out of Shanghai and it could have been the French TGV: comfortable, fast and fairly new. Raced through flat countryside with pockets of high-rise buildings here and there, occasional handfuls of houses, fields, ponds and canals, coming an hour later to Suzhou. What I at first took to be a charming little town of tree-lined streets turned out to be a city of five million ... read more

Asia » China » Jiangsu » Suzhou

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For centuries China stood as a leading civilization, outpacing the rest of the world in the arts and sciences, but in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the country was beset by civil unrest, major famines, military defeats, and foreign occupation. A... ... read more