Jiangsu Culture & Language

Jiangnan culture is the refined, literary strand of Chinese civilisation, and its physical expression is the garden.

The gardens

Built by retired scholar-officials from the eleventh century onward, Suzhou’s gardens compress mountains, water, forest and architecture into a walled plot of an acre or two. The principles are borrowed scenery, framed views, the deliberate concealment and revelation of vistas, and rockwork from Lake Tai chosen for thinness, wrinkles, perforation and permeability — a formal set of criteria. Nothing is symmetrical and nothing is meant to be seen all at once.

Kunqu opera

Born at Kunshan in the sixteenth century and the oldest surviving form of Chinese opera, from which Peking opera descends. It is slow, sung to a bamboo flute, and its libretti are literary texts in their own right — The Peony Pavilion above all. It was the first art form ever inscribed by UNESCO, in 2001, when perhaps a few hundred people could perform it.

Suzhou embroidery

One of China’s four great schools, and the double-sided work — two different images on the two faces of a single transparent silk panel, with no visible threads between — is close to unbelievable in person.

Painting and the Wu school

Suzhou produced the Wu school of painting in the Ming, whose scholar-artists painted the landscape around them for their own circle rather than for a court, and whose work sits at the centre of the Chinese literati tradition. The same milieu produced the Ming furniture now imitated everywhere — hardwood, joined without nails or glue, and stripped of ornament to the point where twentieth-century modernists claimed it as an ancestor.

Pingtan

Suzhou storytelling and ballad singing, performed in the dialect with a three-stringed lute in teahouses.

Mandarin is universal and is what everyone will use with you.

The regional language is Wu Chinese, spoken across southern Jiangsu in the Suzhou, Wuxi and Changzhou varieties. It is not mutually intelligible with Mandarin — it is a separate branch of Chinese with different tones and vocabulary — and the Suzhou variety has a long-standing reputation as the most euphonious in China, described as the soft speech of Wu. Pingtan storytelling is performed in it.

Jianghuai Mandarin is spoken in Nanjing and north of the Yangtze, which is a different dialect group again.

English is more common here than in most of China, given the international business presence in Suzhou and Nanjing, but is still limited outside hotels and larger restaurants.

Useful Mandarin: ni hao, xie xie, duo shao qian, mai dan for the bill.