During the very short business trip to Suzhou, I had only three hours in the morning for free time to explore the city, and after learned that my hotel was just 15 minutes to the old town by taxi, I did my best to visit one of the World Heritage Site listed gardens of Suzhou, the famed Zhouzheng Yuan or in English, the Humble Administrator’s Garden.

At 7.00 AM my taxi dropped me at the garden entrance, the ticket office was still closed but some tourists were already waiting! After got ticket at 7.30 I entered the gardens. The garden’s entrance was quite simple and uninspired similar to usual side or back gates of many Chinese government buildings in many cities. However, behind the gate was totally a different world, the garden was very beautiful with hundreds of trees and plants. After walked through many pools, pavilions, zigzag bridges, stone gardens, artificial mountains, bamboo groves, I started to wonder the size of the garden. The garden was quite large together with the very genius landscape design made strolling in the garden similar to walking in the large botany. The man-made landscape in the garden was unbelievable; there were many Borrowed Scenery to create garden’s many centerpieces. Every turn provided new dimensions of surroundings, a very strict concept of Stroll Garden, but with numerous playful techniques by using gates and corridors, making the views from one gate to other gate to be more in-depth by dictating eyesight with new angles of views, a very sophisticating way that cannot be seen usually in other gardens.

I spent a happy 2.30 hours in this garden, and I still saw only 60% of the whole area! I had to say that this garden was one of the most sophisticating gardens in Asia. It’s really showed the complexity of Chinese landscape design, its long history of development, and hard work of many generations of gardeners. Sometime in my opinion, the garden was quite overwhelmed by too many details with no blank for simple breaking, but that really show me the outstanding of this garden that made this place to be deserved to be on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the must-see places in China.