Easy Diving Blogspot.com posted a piece (with a few stunning winter pictures) about Suzhou. Easy Diving said the city’s history goes back to 514 BC. The gardens were built by imperial officials to create an oasis of tranquility intended for inward reflection.
That tranquility was shattered several times. The gardens were first destroyed during the Taiping Rebellion.
Then the Japanese invaded China during World War II, and the gardens were destroyed a second time.
During Mao’s Cultural Revolution, many of the gardens were destroyed a third time.
It wasn’t until 1981, several years after Mao’s death, and Deng Xiaoping ruled the Communist Party, that most of the gardens were rebuilt along with many of China’s Buddhist temples that had been destroyed.
Start with or return to Return to Suzhou’s Humble Administrator’s Garden: Part 1
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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