Where is Suzhou ?

When a person first sees the word "Suzhou" they most often ask one of these two questions:

1. Where the heck is Suzhou?
2. How the heck do you pronounce "Suzhou"?
   

Let's start with question #1. More on question #2 later.....

Suzhou is in China (People's Republic of China for you geography nitpickers). It's located in the Eastern part of the country about 60 miles West of Shanghai. The litte push-pin in the picture above shows the location. At this scale, Suzhou is close enough to Shanghai that the push-pin blocks out the "Shan" part....so all you see on the map is "ghai" (if you look really close, that is.)

Beijing is about 700 or 800 miles to the North. Hong Kong is about the same distance to the South. I'm not sure how far it is from Indianapolis, but you get 7055 airline miles when you fly through Chicago to Shanghai. And if you're coming from Suzhou from outside of China, then odds are you'll be flying to Shanghai and then going on to Suzhou by car or bus or train.

Suzhou has been around for a long time as a city of one sort or another. It made the big time in China as a center of commerce along the Grand Canal. The canal "made" Suzhou much like the Erie Canal "made" the cities of Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany in upstate New York back in the early 1800's. The only difference is that the Grand Canal did it for Suzhou a couple thousand years earlier.

Today, Suzhou is a conglomeration of the old town and a couple of new districts that were developed beginning in the 1990's. Where we'll be living is to the East of the old town, in the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP). To the West is the Suzhou New District.

Taken all together there are are a bit more than 6 million people in the greater metropolitan area. The local folks say it's a great little "small town" to live in, as compared to the big cities like Shanghai and Beijing. After all, it ranks well down the list of most populous cities in China.

Enough for now. There will be lots more on Suzhou later.

By the way...the answer to question #2 above is that you pronounce it like the names "Sue" and "Joe",,,,,,SueJoe.