Canal trip

Day #100: "Venice of the East"

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July 18th 2013
Suzhou is a small city called the "Venice of the East" by tourist guides, so we had imagined a gentle, peaceful place, forgetting of course that in China a "small" city is still huge by European standards, in this case ten and a half million people. We took a boat trip through the canals, but although it is pretty, with pagodas and traditional homes, there are plenty of visible signs of industry a ... 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