Suzhou Ancient City: Pingjiang Historical District

Author: Yuan Yixin
Publisher:
Publishing Date: 2004-05-01
Features: Suzhou's ancient city is a regional capital, leveraging its water-town characteristics! It is a model of a chessboard layout and can be considered one of the living specimens of ancient Chinese city walls. Pingjiang Historical Street is the most well-preserved area within Suzhou's ancient city to date. The streets and canals within the area, along with the city walls, waterways, small bridges, old residential buildings, archways, ancient wells, ancient trees, gardens, guild halls, temples, and monasteries, form a vivid three-dimensional scroll that takes you back in time and into tradition. Suzhou, the capital of the Wu Kingdom during the Spring and Autumn Period, is a masterful achievement in Chinese urban construction history. For over 2,500 years, despite suffering from numerous wars, Suzhou's ancient city has remained unchanged in its location and layout for millennia. It is not only a marvel in the history of world urban development but also Suzhou's greatest historical and cultural heritage. In 1986, the State Council explicitly required that Suzhou's future development should protect the ancient city's landscape and outstanding historical and cultural heritage while also upgrading the old city's infrastructure, actively developing new districts, and promoting the growth of small towns, striving to gradually transform Suzhou into a modern city with beautiful environments and distinctive water-town characteristics. Suzhou has always regarded the protection of its ancient city's landscape as a historical mission, giving it high priority. Even amidst rapid economic development, Suzhou's ancient city has maintained its "parallel land and water" road and river layout, its "gray, black, and white" urban color scheme, and its "refined, delicate, and exquisite" architectural features. With small bridges over flowing water and white-walled, black-tiled roofs, it forms a distinctive urban identity. It can be said that Suzhou, this ancient city itself, is a vast treasure trove of cultural relics. Located in the eastern part of Suzhou's ancient city, Pingjiang Historical Street is the most well-preserved area to date. It not only houses the World Heritage site of (Cou Garden) and numerous municipal protected cultural relics but also concentrates over 50 controlled-protected ancient buildings in Suzhou. Comparing the Song Dynasty's "Pingjiang Map" and the late Ming Dynasty's "General Map of Waterways within Suzhou Prefecture," one can see that Pingjiang Historical Street has largely maintained the city grid layout since the Tang and Song dynasties. The names of some streets, alleys, canals, and bridges can be found exactly on the "Pingjiang Map." The urban landscape, woven together by city canals, waterways, small bridges, old residential buildings, archways, ancient wells, gardens, guild halls, temples, and monasteries, preserves the characteristics, style, and charm of old Suzhou. The book "Pingjiang Historical Street" systematically introduces the cultural background, historical evolution, road network and waterways, cultural relics and historic sites, architectural arts, and folk customs of this street. These solidified arts take readers back to the long river of history, evoking a sense of nostalgia for the past and fostering emotional resonance across time. Sincerely, we hope that Pingjiang Historical Street will ( does not need translation) in its protection and become a precious heritage for contemporary and future generations to sustainably utilize.