The Couple's Garden Retreat

Dedicated to Pingtan, a traditional Suzhou performing art involving storytelling and ballad singing in the Suzhou dialect. Visitors can enjoy live performances, appreciating the elegant music and the soft, melodic sounds of the local language.

The Suzhou Opera Museum has performances of three traditional local arts — Kunqu opera, which is on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list, Suqu opera, and Pingtan storytelling with ballads. All use the Wu language. There are stages for the opera and a teahouse in Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) style for the storytelling. The museum part has exhibition rooms for each of those three arts, a collection of musical instruments, and other items including block-printed editions of Kunqu opera from the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), original rubbings of local opera scripts, rare handwritten copies of operas and Pingtan from the Qing Dynasty, and items that belonged to well-known deceased singers such as Ma Rufei, Wu Mei, Yu Sulu and Wang Jili.

Housed in the former Confucian Temple, this museum holds a rich collection of ancient stone steles, including the renowned "Four Song Dynasty Steles." It's a quieter alternative to the city's more famous museums, focusing on the art of calligraphy and stone carving.

A beautiful walk along an ancient road paved with hand-cut stones over a thousand years old and lined with shops maintaining traditional architectural styles. It runs from near the Humble Administrator's Garden and Suzhou Museum south into the center of town. There are a surprising number of western-style coffee shops with full English menus, Internet and English books. If you get further north on this road, but south of the museum area, the shops eventually run out and it just becomes a quiet neighbourhood again. This may be the best part of all.

This museum is dedicated to the city's millennia-old silk production history. Beyond static exhibits, visitors can often watch live demonstrations of intricate traditional weaving techniques like Song brocade, making it a deeply immersive cultural experience[citation:4].

Has an incredible collection of pitted, eroded rocks that were greatly appreciated by classical Chinese scholars. It was originally part of a Buddhist monastery. The gardens are a reminder of the Buddhist story of the lions. The layout of the garden follows many twists and turns. It is easy to get quite lost in these winding paths.