☆About Wuxi☆

Foreigners visiting or living in Wuxi won't immediately be aware of the sense of mystique that the region conjures up in the minds of most Chinese people. Whilst people new to the city might look over the parade of new high-rises and shopping malls and not give a thought to how things might have been in ancient times, those who have lived their lifetimes here will know of a Wuxi now lost to history; a Wuxi that still exists in the imaginations of people all over the country. Wuxi is the key location of an area still known as Jiangnan, a term that refers to the rich and fertile area just to the south of the Yangtse River in the east of China, a region that has been a fairytale realm of gardens and canals throughout centuries of Han Chinese history. Across the ages, Wuxi has been part of the subtle splendour of Chinese culture that has bewitched Chinese and foreigners alike of every generation; it has epitomised the oriental grace and exoticism of Asian art that still captures the imaginations of all who wonder about China throughout the world.

Jiangnan is a region, but it is also a concept: it is the very essence of those old Chinese cities that were built on the canals, where little white homes with dark tiled roofs in their thousands opened straight into the busy waterways. It is the home of the so-called Jiangnan Gardens, those perfectly composed feats of Chinese landscaping that epitomise the principles of Feng Shui with walkways, pagodas, pavilions, and ponds of bright red and yellow goldfish adjoining outdoor corridors under the great hanging branches of willows.

That China of yesterday is (perhaps unfairly) predominantly associated with Suzhou, now often called the 'Venice of China'. For centuries, the fame of Suzhou has surpassed that of Wuxi -something that has always irked Wuxi natives who remember that Suzhou was originally something of a gaudy derivative of Wuxi. Suzhou was the creation of a notoriously vainglorious king of the state of Wu, whose thirst for conquest and showmanship led him to command the construction of a new capital of vanity named after himself (then called He Lu City) and who had power shifted there from its original seat at Wuxi some two and a half thousand years ago. The new city was tactically and geomantically inferior to Wuxi, and the end result of the move was the annihilation of He Lu's entire people under the invasion of the soldiers of Yue. Suzhou thereafter remained the seat of Jiangnan's fame and wealth -despite the fact that the real origin of all culture in the area was in fact Wuxi.

It was Tai Bo, the founder of Wuxi city, who oversaw the construction of the first Jiangnanese canal -in fact, the first man-made canal in China. The subsequent extension and networking of canals throughout the region saw a whole culture of waterside dwellings develop -cities and towns began organising themselves around the complicated web of waterways to take advantage of the superior conveniences of transport and trade -and the tradition of Jiangnan was born. Those interconnected canals would eventually unite China's four great rivers into one navigable system and extend all the way to Beijing -forming the so-called Grand Canal that ranks alongside the Great Wall in terms of Chinese feats of engineering.

If you'd arrived in Wuxi in the last decades of the Ming Dynasty, you would have seen a different city entirely, surrounded by a formidable city wall and moat encircling approximately the area now enclosed by downtown Wuxi's ring road. You'd have entered either of the four gates of the city by boat, and made your way along watery boulevards past the Nanchan temple and Chongan markets, turning off along little alleyway streams into the network of little homes.

Very few of those structures survive from the time when Wuxi was known nationwide as the city of 'narrow waterways spanned by tiny arching bridges'. Look at the Donglin Academy today -once just inside the old city's west gate -and you'll see where the old dock still stands: students from across the land used to pull up there after journeys taking weeks, to join the circle of intellectuals who dared to publicly question the evident corruption of the Ming rulers.

The city wall and canals remained right up until the 1950s, when Wuxi was at last earmarked for modernisation. For decades Wuxi had been gaining a reputation as the back flower garden of Shanghai, the industrial reality behind the wealthy commercial centre of the Bund. Urban development and the need for expansion saw the canals covered over in bitumen, and Wuxi began to take on a drearier and more utilitarian look.

Nowadays, the old Grand Canal still passes right through Wuxi -the only city crossed by the Canal along its entire length -but no longer stretches even half of the way to Beijing. There are still many parts of urban Wuxi that feature waterways, but the only area that remotely captures the old grace of Jiangnan is that around Qingming Bridge on the Ancient Canal, where century-old buildings stand as always at the edge of the canal.

In the 1980's, this part of Wuxi was the city's greatest claim to fame -foreigners visiting China would go to Beijing to see the Great Wall, and then take a side trip to Wuxi to see the Grand Canal. Tourist boats aplenty passed under the span of Qingming Bridge, the oldest little marble archway that still remains. With rapid development, however, the waterways were becoming quickly polluted, and the entire tourist project was soon scrapped. For the first time, dikes along the canal were erected, and the real estate quickly began to show marks of decay.

Now at Qingming Bridge, foreigners in Wuxi have their last chance to see the city's old graceful charm that was once definitive of this region as it takes its last breaths. Wandering though the dark old alleyways, visitors will enjoy the bustle of the common folk as the street-side marketeers bellow on into the twilight hours, not knowing when the city authorities will finally close up the district. Wuxi's tourist board has big plans to develop this whole historic stretch and restore it to its original glory -certainly something to look forward to -but never again will the canals be the genuine heart of this old capital of waterways, and Wuxi will have finally completed its transformation into the economic centre of southern Jiangsu Province we know and enjoy today.

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