Ou Yuan
(Boat from Ou Yuan with our friend, Dao Yue sitting on the right: Suzhou, China)
On our exploratory trip around Suzhou on a chilly February weekend, Ying, Dao Yue and I managed to arrive shortly before closing time at Ou Yuan. In English it is known as ‘The Couple’s Garden Retreat’. It was a confusing journey from another garden on foot that led to this tardy arrival (and as usual with my anecdotes of China, in general there is a certain amount of exploring, rather than actual planning).
We began at a central garden called the Canglang Pavillion and the walk between the gardens looked less than strenuous. We took a shortcut along the canal but a gruff security guard popped out of nowhere like a troll from under a bridge, demanding our names and birthplaces, except mine. Clearly I was far too idiotic to waste time shouting at. Dao Yue received the most attention, since he was holding the map and also, under pressure, might have fibbed about being Suzhounese. After our altercation, he scoffed at our plan to walk to Ou Yuan – I guessed his spirited retort to our estimation of a short walk; “It’ll take an hour at least!” He obliged us by drawing a detailed map in the stone atop the canal wall with a pebble. In the end he was much less a troll and more like an agreeable uncle. We placed bets and I won, choosing 50 minutes as my time to get there.
The road leading to Ou Yuan is the strangest tourist route I could imagine; no shops, no toilets, no signs or directions, not even a stinking tofu stall in sight. We stopped every few minutes to hound the few pedestrians for instructions, but they all pointed us onward into the gravel coated roadway cutting through ancient communities of canal-side dwellings. There were demolition sites, rubbish heaps and homes with boarded doors, none of them higher than two storeys – it was a different kind of tourist route altogether. And then, the crowning glory of it all was the door-less lavatory. I experienced the entertainment of this in my desperation (after such an extended walk) of needing to visit the toilet. I walked into the squat, rectangular hut and upon entering was immediately baffled by the room inside. It was tiny and all it contained were two basic squatting pans in the floor, raised on a step of sorts and a short three foot wall between them. Any person coming in the door would be able to see who and what the occupants were doing at that moment. There was no door anywhere. At this point, I began to laugh a bit – in surprise as much as amusement. So I chose the second pan, furthest from the door, perhaps sheltered slightly by the short wall. I finished and noted there was no flush and no sink. Just as I was about to take a general photograph of the place before leaving, a woman stepped in behind me with a frown and I decided to leap out of the doorway before she asked me a difficult question made more confusing in Mandarin.
And finally to the garden, it is called a couple’s retreat for obvious reasons, but the garden also has two complete halves, split down the centre with a line of attractive period buildings. We were very taken with the general easy beauty of the garden, it is not one of the very large and famous gardens, but it remains one of my favourites, despite not seeing it all. On this weekend, the weather was so cloudy and dark that the colours of the gardens were muted and watery, it only lent them more of a dreamlike quality. With ten minutes left to race around the remaining sections, we opted for a boat ride to the other side of the canal instead. This lady sang a song to us as she punted along the canal, it was about the seasons and the changing flowers, so the boys informed me. It was genuinely a fun experience and she seemed to want to break out her voice. She has the wry expression of a sage, one who has seen much change and loses herself in the water of the canal, the gentle rocking of the boat under her and the songs.
