Suzhou

Begun in 1509, the largest garden in Suzhou, with water over half its ground. Entry needs booking in your own name, and the first hour after opening is the least crowded. In summer lotus covers the ponds.

Covered walkways run nearly 700 metres, and every window is cut to a different shape, so each step frames a new scene. In the inner court stands Guanyun Peak, a 6.5-metre Taihu rock riddled with holes that anchors the whole garden.

Founded by a monk under the Yuan, with half its ground taken by a maze of pitted Taihu rock. Climbing in and out of the tunnels you pass the same pavilion several times over, which makes it the garden children like best.

Among the smallest of Suzhou's gardens, yet its buildings crowd so close round a single pond that it reads larger. From spring through summer to autumn it opens at night with Kunqu or pingtan performed room by room, ticketed apart.

A canal and a stone lane run in parallel for about 1.5 kilometres. A map of Suzhou carved in stone in 1229 shows the street exactly where it is today. From a teahouse window over the water you watch the sampans go by.

Bai Juyi, sent here as prefect in 825, dug the canal and built the bank that became this street, running seven li to Tiger Hill. The first few hundred metres are thick with shops, but walk further and it turns back into a neighbourhood lane.

Yunyan Pagoda, completed in 961, has tilted slowly across ten centuries and now visibly leans. At the foot, the rock pool called Jianchi carries the legend that the tomb of King Helü of Wu lies beneath it.

The temple whose bell rings through Zhang Ji's Tang poem about mooring at Maple Bridge by night. Each New Year's Eve the bell is struck 108 times, and around midnight the crowd fills the canal bridge in front.

A canal village an hour or so southeast of the city, where crossing three particular bridges in turn is said to bring luck, so wedding processions loop over them. Tuisi Garden inside it was added to the World Heritage listing in 2000.

Designed by I. M. Pei and opened in 2006, its white walls and grey rooflines redrawn as geometry make the building the main exhibit. No admission fee, though a visit needs booking, and it closes Mondays. It is next door to the Humble Administrator's Garden.

A canal village of stacked stone bridges, made famous abroad by Chen Yifei's 1984 painting of its Twin Bridges. Suzhou is a drive of more than sixty minutes away, and staying a night inside lets you see the lanes empty once the day groups leave.

Laid out by the Northern Song writer Su Shunqin, it is Suzhou's oldest surviving classical garden. The canal outside its wall is borrowed into the view, and over a hundred lattice windows, each patterned differently, line its galleries. Tour groups are rare.

Made by a late Qing official and his wife, so two gardens, east and west, pair up on either side of the house. Canals wrap it on three sides, and though it is close to the north end of Pingjiang Road, few find it, so the pond edge makes a calm place to sit.

The one gate in Suzhou's old wall to survive whole with both its water gate for boats and its land gate for people. Ruiguang Pagoda stands inside, and from Wumen Bridge over the canal in front, gate and pagoda fit into one frame.

The big lake of the Industrial Park new town, where the Gate of the Orient, a tower straddling the shore like a pair of trousers, rises over the water. It shows a Suzhou far from the old gardens, and after dark tower lights shimmer beside the lakeside path.

Housed in a Qing guild hall built by merchants from Shanxi, with its old wooden stage still covered in gilt carving. It shows costumes and instruments of Kunqu, the opera born in Suzhou, and the stage hosts shows only on set days, so check the schedule ahead.

A Taoist temple amid the Guanqian Street shops in central Suzhou; its Sanqing Hall, rebuilt in 1179, survives as Southern Song timberwork. Outside are department stores and pastry shops, but past the gate it turns quiet and smells of incense.