The Countryside

One of the perks of the trip down to Wuzhen was the opportunity to see a little countryside.  The road from Suzhou to Shanghai is one continuous strip of urban development and industrial parks.  But the road to the South-West, toward Wuzhen and Hangzhou, turns into green fields about 10 miles outside of Suzhou.  Between Suzhou and Wuzhen it is flat....very flat. Paradise for rice farming.  If you continue past Wuzhen to Hangzhou it eventually turns into more hilly tea country.

The South-East of China...in the Yangzte River flood plain...is the breadbasket of China's agriculture.  The land is flat and fertile.  And every drop of water East of the Himilaya's runs this way toward the sea.  The only problem is controlling the water....to drain it when it rains too much and to spread it around when it rains too little.  The Chinese mastered that problem a couple of thousand years ago when they cut a network of canals through out the countryside. 

 These photos are not very good, as they were taken from a moving bus.  But they do provide a taste of the rural landscape in Southern JiangSu and Northern ZheJiang provinces.  The top photo shows the fields of rice with centrally located farmhouses.  The second photo shows a duck farm.  On the road to Wuzhen you pass many duck farms raising tons and tons of ducks.  It takes that many ducks to supply all the duck tongues required by the restaurants, I guess.

The last photo shows not agriculture, but aquaculture.  The bottom lands surrounding the Grand Canal are diked off into aqua-pens for raising of......well, I'm not sure.  It may be fish or freshwater shrimp or frogs or snakes or who knows what.  But whatever they are raising they must be raising a lot of it.  There are acres and acres of these water pens.