Home>>China Travel Guide>>Suzhou Guide>>Suzhou Culture
Suzhou Culture
Suzhou is a national cultural center in any sense of art, festival, classic garden, local traditions, even dialect and opera.
Suzhou traditional handicrafts include Suzhou embroidery, scroll mounting, lanterns, fans, mahogany furniture, jade carving, silk tapestry, traditional painting pigments, and more. Other well-known traditional cultures are Suzhou cuisine, Kun Opera, Suzhou Opera and Suzhou Ballad-singing (Suzhou Pingtan) and soft spoken dialect. All of these cultural heritages have accompanied the city in its long history and fascinate all travelers domestically and internationally. Kun Opera is one of China’s classic operas with a history of 600 years. As its influence on other Chinese folk theatre forms, the opera has been praised as the motherhood of dozens of operas and was honored as one of the Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization in 2001.
Suzhou classical garden makes the city an international reputation. Chinese gardens can be classified into two categories, private garden and royal garden. Suzhou’s gardens are associated with the latter. These gardens originated from the desire to retire from the strife of officialdom and to shun from worldly affairs. There were once over 200 gardens in the city and 60 of them are still in the nice preservation today. Total nine of these gardens have been listed in the World Heritage Sites and the Humble Administrator’s Garden is ranked at the highest rating of 5-AAAAA in the national tourist attraction ranking.
