Suzhou has been famous for gardens for about a thousand years, and the Master-of-Nets Garden is often called the best of them, though it is among the smallest. It was first laid out in the twelfth century by a retired official and rebuilt in the eighteenth, and the name means fisherman, a modest title for a retiree who wanted to live like one. Everything is arranged to make a small plot of land feel limitless. A pond sits at the centre, with halls, pavilions and covered walkways around it, rocks piled like mountains, a zigzag bridge, and views that are framed by windows cut into walls in the shape of fans, moons and vases. One of its courtyards was copied in New York's Metropolitan Museum as the Astor Court.
The garden is part of the UNESCO listing of Classical Gardens of Suzhou. The best time to visit is early morning, before the tour groups arrive, or in the evening, when on some nights the garden hosts small performances of music and opera in the pavilions, lit by lanterns. Look at the details, the carved doors, the paving laid in patterns of pebbles, the old pines trained into shapes, and the way a single bamboo against a white wall becomes a picture.
Suzhou lies on the old Grand Canal, in the Yangtze delta, and the city is known for silk, canals and stone bridges, and for a gentle, wet climate. Riding here is not the point, and an honest account should say so. The urban roads are busy with electric scooters, taxis and buses, the lanes between the old houses are narrow, and foreign riders face a maze of licence, registration and permit rules in China, so most visitors arrive by taxi or metro. Spring, with its blossom, and autumn, with chrysanthemums and mild weather, are the most pleasant times. Summers are very humid, and a visit in plum rain season in June can mean drizzle for days.
Everything you need is within a short distance, and Suzhou is a large city of several million. The old quarter around the garden has tea houses and restaurants serving local dishes such as sweet and sour mandarin fish, crab-roe noodles and osmanthus cakes. Tickets for the garden are cheap and sometimes limited, so arrive early. The canals are best explored by boat or on foot, and a walk along Pingjiang Road in the evening, with its lanterns and waterside cafés, is a pleasant way to end the day.