The City of Old Men

 The traditional Chinese character for doorway or gate is 門.  Even for an idiot like me, this is easy to recognize.  It looks like the swinging doors on a saloon.   Or at least it did until the government decided to go with simplified Chinese characters back in the 1950s.  The simplified version is 门.  Easier for people to write and remember - so the logic goes.  The simplified character looks a bit like the depiction of a door on a blueprint.  But I think it lacks the charm of the original.  I think the Chinese people think the same, because you see the traditional character as often as you do the more simplified version.

 The phonetic (or Pinyin) spelling of the character is "men".   Men means gate.  I've mentioned before that the city of Suzhou still has several old men that remain from its days as a fortified city.  It's a city of old men.

One of these old men, Pan Men, has been preserved as a scenic area.  The old men is on the South West corner of the old city.  I checked Google maps for a good bus route and found that the 47 bus would pick me up in front of the apartment and drop me off right in front of the old men.  So I memorize the number of turns the bus should take and counted the bus stops and then hopped on the bus.

Now, Google maps has proven to be pretty darned accurate....but in this case the bus started making some turns that weren't shown on the map.  I suspended my disbelief until the bus crossed over the canal on the far side of the city.  That was definitely not on the map.  My faith in Google was starting to crumble.  So I got off the bus at the first chance and tried to figure out where I was.

There was a big plaza nearby with a park and a pedestrian bridge that crossed over the canal back to the old city.  So I strolled through there and checked out some of the buildings in the plaza.  That is where I found the Suzhou Planning Exhibition Center.  I spent about 30 minutes there and enjoyed the scale models of the city...and enjoyed the air conditioning and clean bathrooms even more.

After crossing over the pedestrian bridge, I found another one of the old men.  This one was Xu Men, and is shown in the second photo from the top.  Well actually, you can barely see the gateway in the photo but you get a good view of the remaining section of the city wall.  I figure the arch of the gateway is probably 15 feet high, so the wall itself is a good 30 feet tall.  Xu Men is not really developed as a historic area.  It's just an old men in the middle of a residential area.

By this time I'd figured that I was about 5 blocks North of where I was supposed to be.  So I strolled south along the canal until I got to the Pan Men area.   At that point I realized that the road that the bus was supposed to take was gone.  They were tearing up a three or four block section for repairs.  The 47 bus was obviously following an alternate route because there was no way it could get down this street.  My faith in Google was somewhat restored.

Pan Men is advertised as the most ancient and best preserved of Suzhou's old city gates.  The area around it has been developed as a scenic area and you have to pay to get in.  I forget how much it was, but was not much.  For a little extra you can buy a ticket to climb the pagoda that is shown by the photo at the top. I bought.  I climbed.  I almost killed myself on the dark, steep, and narrow stairway with strategically placed head bump hazards.  OK...I didn't really almost kill myself.  But my bald head was showing a few splotches of purple for a day or two.

The Pan Men area covers several acres.  There are several traditional buildings, one of which is an old temple.  For 1 RMB you can ring the temple bell.  The third photo from top shows a youngster in mid-ring.  There is also a large pond surrounded by gardens and walking paths.  The photo immediately above and the one just above it give you a taste.

You can see the old men in the photo above.  The gate itself is supposed to date back 2500 years or so.  I have no idea which parts are original and which parts have been added later. The wooden gate tower is, no doubt, not nearly that old.  The stones, however, look like they've been there for a long time.  As with Xu Men, the walls are probably a good 30 feet high.  The gate way double-doored...with one on the outside and one on the inside and a space in between where life could be abruptly ended by the guys on top.

Pan Men is considered special because it is a combination land-water gate.  There is a second archway over the waterway that connected the exterior canal with the canals inside the city.  Iron gates could be lowered to block boats from entering the city.

On the inside of the wall there is an old stone ramp which gave troops and horse-drawn carts access to the top of the walls.   It's an easy climb up the ramp.  On top, you can buy souvenirs from the shop in the tower-gate.  Or you can dress up like a warrior, climb onto a fake horse, and get your picture taken with a plastic spear.  You can also inspect the old mechanisms for raising the gates or take a walk on top of the wall.

The photo above was taken peering over the top of the wall.  It shows the waterway that passes below through the water gate.  The photo below shows the path along the top of the wall.  It give you a feel for how massively thick the wall is.  There is room for two lanes of traffic and a couple of bike lanes.  And this is at the top.  The wall is probably twice as thick at the base.  

So lets do some math.   The old city of Suzhou is a rectangle of land encircled by a canal.  My old buddy Google maps shows that it is about 3 miles from North to South and about 2 miles from East to West.  That adds up to a perimeter of 10 miles.  10 miles of wall.  And the wall here is 30 feet high, 20 feet wide at the top, and maybe 40 feet wide at the bottom.   Most of the wall is gone now, so I don't know whether the entire perimeter was as substantial as it is at Pan Men.  But no matter how you figure it, there were a lot of rocks. 

So, to bring this overstretched pun to conclusion.... 10 miles of wall requires a lot of gateways for the people passing in and out.  A lot of men.  Most of the walls are gone, but the old men remain.  Men of stone, they are.