XIANGMEN
Our Suzhou adventures have been broken into three parts. This post is the third, about the Xiangmen ancient city wall.
One day, our wanderings found us at the foot of Xiangmen, one of the gates of Suzhou’s ancient city wall. A restored vestige of the past, Xiangmen houses the Suzhou City Wall Museum (fairly comprehensive, even if you don’t read or speak Chinese!) as well as an inviting green space for recreation. Our favorite find? The family-run shop in the traditional building at the top, where its friendly proprietors fed us the tastiest, heartiest bowls of dumpling soup we’ve ever eaten (10 RMB each). As we happily slurped our lunch, we observed “wall life”: a quartet of mahjongg players facing off at a nearby table, grandparents chasing after their toddler charges, a young man maneuvering his remote helicopter to land in the shadow of the wall’s massive gong…
