Visiting Tiger Hill

After my little adventure to The Master of Nets Garden, I decided to give the last major tourist attraction I hadn't seen in Suzhou a try: Tiger Hill (虎丘 Hu Ch'iu). Tiger hill is important because it contains the 2500-year old tomb of one of the ancient kings of this area, King Helu (吴王闔閭) of the state of Wu (吴国). For the vast majority of you who haven't read an inordinately large amount of historical books, 2500 years ago China looked nothing like what it looks like today. In fact, China wasn't even one single country but a large and ever-changing number of smaller states that were in a constant state of war with one another trying to unify China, and the state of Wu was one of these.

Another fun fact is that the king entombed under Tiger Hill apparently had a general in his army named Sunzi (孙子), or in the west as Sun Tzu, who wrote the famous Art Of War. 

Now starring Wesley Snipes!

Thus, I went to Tiger Hill with a great deal of anticipation, but was distraught at my very first sight once I entered the site, the humongous hordes of tourists:

"And they shall cover the face of the earth, that one cannot be able to see the earth...And they shall fill thy houses, and the houses of all thy servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians; which neither thy fathers, nor thy fathers' fathers have seen, since the day that they were upon the earth unto this day." - The Book of Exodus, Chapter 10, Verses 5-6.

The most famous landmark of Tiger Hill, the pagoda - officially known as the Rock in the Clouds Pagoda (Yun Yansi Ta 云岩寺塔) was visible from very far away, though as its name suggests, was continually blurred by mists and clouds that are naturally occurring in this part of China:

The area leading up to the pagoda was very scenic when not overrun by tourists:

There was also a great collection of Chinglish leading up to to the pagoda as well:

The pagoda - like the Leaning Tower of Pisa - is on a slant, rather than completely straight. Unlike Pisa, however, the pagoda is not slowly sinking into the ground!

I have no idea who this guy was, he just wanted my photo. So I made sure his buddy took one with my camera as well.

Heading down the other side of Tiger Hill, I found a lot more nature and a lot fewer tourists, which was a lovely change:

My adventure with Tiger Hill didn't stop after exiting it, though. This is because the exit of Tiger Hill leads to a bunch of highly overpriced 'special' taxis that happily take you anywhere you wish to go for an extremely steep price, almost 3 times what it would take for a standard taxi ride back to my university campus. As I've mentioned previously, I am extremely stingy with my money. That is not to say that I am short on money, it's just simply who I am. Thus, after lovingly telling the driver off in Chinese for being a dirty, rotten cheat, I ended up waking around the ENTIRE outside wall of Tiger Hill in search of a taxi. The scenery surrounding Tiger Hill was much less impressive than inside the walls:

After a half hour of walking along the outside edge of Tiger Hill, I finally found a taxi, who quickly - and cheaply - got me back to campus:

Until next time!

Visiting the Master of Nets Garden

The other day I decided to venture out alone and see another of Suzhou's garden. This one is called the Master of Nets Garden or wang shih yuen (网师园), and happens to be the smallest of all of Suzhou's gardens. The weather wasn't very agreeable, as it had been heavily raining the night before, but I decided to go anyways.

In a taxi on my way to the garden

Once I got to the garden, which was surprisingly close to me - located on the same street that those wacky storefront Chinglish signs I blogged about before - I was very disappointed in the entrance sign leading me to the garden:

Keeping it classy!

After wandering down some residential back alleys, following the hand-written signs leading to the garden, I finally found a semi-respectable entrance to the garden:

One great thing was the total lack of tourists in the area, as you can see in the 'long' ticket line below:

Despite the comically-bad entrance to the garden, once I was in the garden itself, it did not disappoint. Despite being the smallest of the gardens, whoever designed it certainly knew how to do a lot with a little, as the tiny garden was designed like a labyrinth, with many tiny nooks and crannies and hallways that kept turning you right around, and made the tiny garden seem far bigger than it was:

For such a small garden, however, it was sure able to cram in a whole bunch of tiny shops with strange Chinglish:

It wasn't long before other tourists started to arrive in droves. I was honestly amazed at the large variety of Caucasians touring the garden, as I heard French, Spanish, German, and American English being spoken around me. To stand out from the other laowai, I thus decided to only speak very loudly in Chinese, which got me a lot of strange looks from a lot of the other tourists.

As is the case with most Chinese tourist attractions, the exit to the gardens led to a variety of shops selling largely the same bunch of overpriced, touristy crap that you can get at any other Chinese tourist attraction, with a few interesting exceptions:

It was the first time I'd ever seen Cultural Revolution Posters (right side of the picture) for sale in a tourist area

Having had a good time at the garden, I decided to go to one of the last major tourist attractions I had yet to see in Suzhou: Tiger Hill or Hu Qiu (虎丘), which I shall cover in my next blog post.

Until next time!