周荘

Zhouzhuang is the most famous of the Jiangnan water towns, a centuries-old canal settlement on the shores of South Lake in the far southeast of Suzhou's administrative area. Founded more than nine hundred years ago and built along a grid of intersecting canals, the town is often described as the archetype of the Chinese water town, and its image of stone bridges, white-walled merchant houses, and willow-lined waterways has been reproduced on everything from postage stamps to tea packaging. It was one of the first water towns in the Yangtze delta to be systematically protected, and it is now a UNESCO-recognized historic site.

The town's signature view is the Twin Bridges, a pair of adjacent stone arches, Shide Bridge and Yinlin Bridge, built in the Wanli reign of the Ming dynasty. Their intersecting silhouettes so caught the imagination of the painter Chen Yifei that his 1984 oil depiction of them, later presented to a Chinese leader by a foreign head of state, helped launch Zhouzhuang onto the international tourist map. The bridges sit at the heart of the old town, surrounded by the kind of canal-side houses that locals still inhabit.

Among the historic houses open to visitors, the most impressive is Shen House, the sprawling Ming-Qing residence of the wealthy merchant Shen Wansan, whose fortune supposedly helped bankroll the early Ming dynasty's capital at Nanjing. The Zhang House, smaller but more finely restored, opens onto a courtyard that contains its own private canal, a reminder that in old Zhouzhuang the waterway was the front door. The town's Daoist Chengxu Temple and the Buddhist Quanfu Temple round out the religious sites.

For most visitors, the appeal of Zhouzhuang is less any single building than the overall atmosphere: lantern-lit lanes at dusk, wooden sculling boats pole-driven along narrow canals, tea houses perched at bridge heads. Early morning and evening are the best times to walk the town, when day-trip crowds thin and the stone streets return to something like the quiet described in early travel writing. South Lake, on the southern edge of town, offers a wider landscape of lotus beds and willows that frames the old town against open water. For travelers who have time for only one water town in the Suzhou region, Zhouzhuang is the canonical choice.