Fanli Bridge on Lake Tai in Wuxi.

Courtney with our Wuxi tour guide, Miss Qin, on the boat we took out on Lake Tai.

We kicked off our tour of the area around Shanghai today, which includes stops in Wuxi, Suzhou, and Hangzhou. As our tour guide in Wuxi put it, she thinks of these four places as four girls, all beautiful but each in her own way. Shanghai, she said, is the fashionable one (think modern highrises). Suzhou is the homebody who stays in her gardens and does needlework. Hangzhou is the talented one, skilled in artistic ventures such as calligraphy. Wuxi, where we began our day, is the down-to-earth girl next door.

Wuxi is known for Lake Tai, the third-largest freshwater lake in China. The lake is famous for its beautiful scenery and for its production of high-quality freshwater pearls. In the morning, we took a little boat out on the lake and took in its serene beauty. The water was so still that if you took a picture of the mountains in the distance and its reflection in the lake and flipped the photo, you won’t be able to tell which is the real thing and which is the reflection.

After departing the lake, we went to a nearby pearl factory. Freshwater pearl farming is a huge industry in Wuxi, and the people here take great pride in it. In fact, our guide told us, when local girls get married, there are two things their mothers must give them as wedding presents — a dresser made from the wood of a local type of trees and a big freshwater pearl.

A rower practices on Lake Tai.

We were given a brief introduction to the kind of pearls produced in Wuxi, including a demonstration where they cracked open a clam and scooped out the little beads of pearls. However, that was followed by the only somewhat unpleasant part of our day. After the introduction, we walked around the store a bit. There were some nice things, but we thought they were kind of expensive, so we didn’t buy anything. However, our tour guide told us that lunch wasn’t ready yet and that we needed to stay for at least another half hour, in part because she’s obligated to have a tour group stay at that location for that length of time. Only when that’s done would the store give her a note saying she brought a group there for X amount of time, fulfilling one of her responsibilities.

So we just stood around for a bit. During that time, the clerks in the store kept trying to push us to buy. One woman even ran after my dad with a box of pearl-powder cream that he had looked at earlier. She explained that if a tour group comes into the store and don’t buy anything, all the salespeople in the store get five yuan deducted from their salaries. She offered the cream to my dad for half price (which was a very good price compared to in the U.S.), and he relented.

That wasn’t the end of it, however. After a few minutes, the tour guide came up to us and practically begged Courtney and I to buy something. Apparently the lack of purchases also reflects poorly on her, in the way tour guides’ performances are evaluated. I could understand the salespeople in the store pushing us to buy stuff, but it was a bit much to have the tour guide doing it, too. However, according to Chinese customs, you can’t really give a brush-off to something like this. So we walked around a bit more, and Courtney found a nice pearl necklace. After some haggling, the salesperson agreed to sell it for half price ($50), and all sides were finally appeased. While we did get some stuff at decent prices, the hard sell — basically forcing you to buy — was definitely annoying. I wasn’t so much mad at the tour guide or the salespeople — they were only doing what they had to do — as I was with their companies’ policies that force them to do such things. The pressure sale is definitely an annoyance to Western visitors, and it’s something that China will have to learn to improve on as it continues to open up to the world.

Whatever unpleasantness that arose during the factory tour was quickly washed away with a sumptuous lunch that included delicious fish and chicken dishes. Our tour guide had mentioned that if there was one word to describe Wuxi, it would be “sweet”, and that’s definitely reflected in the local cuisine.

After lunch, we set off for Hangzhou, about a three-hour drive away. Along the way, however, we made a quick detour to Suzhou. Since ancient times, Suzhou and Hangzhou have always been mentioned together and have been renowned for their scenery. When we entered Suzhou, we saw houses with whitewashed walls and black-shingle roofs — the city’s trademark architectural style. Between these houses were crowded and chaotic streets bubbling with activity.

The Lion Forest Garden

Our destination in Suzhou was the Lion Forest Garden, one of the four most famous gardens in Suzhou. It was built as a residence for a monk in the Yuan dynasty. It’s called a garden, but you go there not to see the flowers, but the rocks. The entire grounds were filled with caves, tunnels, and staircases made of bizzarely shaped rocks, many of which resembled lions (hence the name). The main path took you through numerous tunnels, and each time you emerged from one, you discovered a whole new section of the garden that you didn’t know existed. The most beautiful part was the area surrounding a small koy pond that had a pretty pavilion and a stoneboat.

After our tour of the garden, we resumed our trek to Hangzhou, and it was already dinner time when we arrived. We had some spare time after dinner, so we took a cab out to the busiest street in the city, in part to search for a Starbucks (which we could not, although we did come across five KFCs on that one road). Hangzhou, from what we saw on the drive in, is a very cosmopolitan city. It has numerous coffeeshops and teahouses around West Lake, the main attraction in Hangzhou. Also, the street we visited was the least Chinese area we’ve seen since arriving in China. It was dotted with Western department stores and designer shops — all peddling Western brands at prices that are much higher than in the United States (one pair of CK jeans, for instance, cost more than 1,200 yuan, or almost $200). We went into one building that was basically an indoor clothes and shoes bazzar, and the moment we got off the escalator, one of the shopkeepers spotted Courtney, and the “FOREIGNER” alarm went off as she enthusiastically waved at us and shouted out “Shoes!” in English. Ironically, Courtney answered, in Chinese, “No, thank you.”