Work to preserve Pingjiang ensures that it remains a vibrant testament to the city's history, not just a showpiece trapped in its past, Zhao Xu reports in Suzhou.

Editor's note: An array of Chinese cities have maintained their cultural memories in the form of historical neighborhoods that have only added to their multilayered charm and vigor with the passage of time. China Daily is taking readers on a journey to some of these timeless areas, where President Xi Jinping has left his footsteps and remarked on the preservation and vitalization of heritage. In this installment, we walk through Suzhou's Pingjiang Historic District, where flagstone roads and flowing water tell a story of Jiangnan, punctuated by ancient, picturesque bridges.

"Upon arriving in Suzhou, you'll see homes nestled by the river's edge. The idle land is as scant as the waterways and bridges are abundant …" Du Xunhe, a poet living in the latter half of the ninth century, during the Tang Dynasty (618-907), wrote in a poem to a friend.

"Canals and bridges — together, they had been visually defining the city for as long as Chinese poetry could remember," says Ruan Yongsan, a lifelong Suzhou resident who has spent the past 55 years of his life trying to protect the land's — and his own — memories.

Occasionally, he will take people on a tour. And the trip will often start at the southernmost point of the Pingjiang River in the northeastern part of the Old Town of Suzhou, which in turn is located in the heart of the city.

There, a small bridge named the Yuanqiao Bridge — yuan means garden and qiao means bridge — is fabled for being where Helyu, king of the vassal state of Wu during the Spring and Autumn Period (770-476 BC), had once lounged, presumably on an amiable spring day. In the fifth century BC, the ambitious ruler built a grand city in modern-day Suzhou, a watery land embedded in the rice-producing Yangtze River Delta region.

A few steps away from the bridge, under a small, pagoda-shaped structure, stands a stone stele with a map inscription bearing the name Pingjiang Tu (The Map of Pingjiang).

"The map was first made in 1229 during the Song Dynasty (960-1279), a time when Suzhou was known as Pingjiang. And the area it covered essentially corresponds with that of our Old Town," says Ruan.

"For all its reputation as the earliest existing city map known to the world, it also serves as a comforting assurance that what we are seeing today is not so different from what people would have witnessed right here 800 years ago."

Of the 360 or so bridges the map famously contains, a dozen still straddle the 1.6 kilometer-long Pingjiang River, which is clearly depicted, although not specifically named on the map.

The river, and the Pingjiang Road that runs alongside it, form the core of the Pingjiang Historic District, a 116-hectare zone which is essentially — to use Ruan's words — "an authentic, boiled-down version of what Suzhou has been throughout history".

Among other things, the 78-year-old surveyor-turned-preservationist is referring to what he dubs as "the double-chessboard layout" of the Old Town, which first appeared during the Tang Dynasty around the ninth century.

"Despite the region's abundance of water, all the waterways you see inside the Old Town are artificial passages — canals built as straight as ruler to a chessboard effect, with the ones running north-south intersecting with those running east-west at every junction," he says. "Upon this densely woven water network, a road grid was overlaid, so that the road traffic and the water traffic always move hand in hand."

These days, those taking a boat along the Pingjiang River are still looking up to their pedestrian counterparts strolling alongside them on the stone-paved Pingjiang Road, the latter sandwiched between the waterway and a row of black-tiled, white-painted houses, most of which date back to the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The best way to get an unobstructed view of the Pingjiang River is to stand on one of its dozen bridges, all of which are short given that the canal's width is no more than five meters. If poems are to be believed, in Tang-Dynasty Suzhou, red-painted wooden bridges contrasted beautifully with the green water running underneath. This was before they were replaced by their stone successors from the Song Dynasty, some of which have survived, at least in part.

One example is the Shou'an Bridge, which, on Pingjiang Tu, appears over the canal under a different name. Certain sections of the bridge are tinted by a slightly purplish hue.

According to Pei Hong, a local cultural official-cum-amateur historian, the color is typical of a native stone material that was widely used for construction during the Song Dynasty.

Between 1034 and 1035, Fan Zhongyan (989-1052), a Song poet and politician, served as the governor of Suzhou, his ancestral home, where his flood-control efforts won wide acclaim. At a time when the only way for a commoner to enter officialdom was through excelling in exams at various levels — the highest of which, dubbed dianshi, or palace exams, were held every two or three years in the capital — Fan launched initiatives to provide free education to poor school-age children.

Those who managed to battle their way to the very top were known as zhuangyuan, and of the 114 zhuangyuan of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), 26 were Suzhou natives. In 2014, a museum dedicated to their memory opened in Niujia Lane, one of the small alleyways extending westward from the Pingjiang Road, less than 100 meters from a two-story building where Ruan was born in 1946.

"It's only fitting that this museum is housed inside the onetime residence of a man named Pan Shi'en (1769-1854), who became zhuangyuan at only 25, before going on to serve three emperors as a top cabinet member," says Ruan.

"If the Pingjiang Road is the backbone of the historical district, then the many alleyways that run perpendicularly to it — there are eight to its east and nine to its west, including the Niujia Lane — are where many of the area's stories have been tucked away."

Some of the stories were about silk weavers, who lived in concentrated numbers in the area, "filling it with the rhythmic clacking of their looms", according to a popular saying of the Qing Dynasty.

During his visit to the historical district in July last year, President Xi Jinping talked about "the artisanal spirit of Suzhou" as underpinning the city's lasting prestige.

"Aiming for perfection — that's what it's all about," says Pei. "Another aspect of the story, as President Xi has rightfully noted, is the sense of innovation that has infused Suzhou's history."

According to Pei, despite being steeped in classical education, the elite members of the Suzhou society championed for an overhaul of the country's archaic educational system in the late 19th century, when China was facing both internal and external crises.

Less than 400 meters north of the Niujia Lane is another alleyway where Pan Zuyin (1830-90), one of the best-known grandsons of Pan Shi'en, had lived. Like his grandfather, Pan Zuyin proved himself a top achiever both in, and outside of, the exam halls; unlike his grandfather, the younger Pan built for himself and his family a much more spacious abode, and demonstrated a much greater passion for antiques, particularly ancient bronzeware.

In late 1937, around the time Suzhou fell to the invading Japanese army, the posterity of Pan Zuyin, fully aware of the importance of the two giant pieces of ritual bronze he had collected, buried them right there, inside their residence. There, the vessels lay underground for 16 years, before they were dug out and donated to the country in 1953. Today, their replicas are standing where the originals had been buried, reminding every visitor of the city's travails and triumph.

Back in 1937, the Ruan family left too, before returning eight years later in 1945, after Japan's official surrender in September that year.

In 1958, 12-year-old Ruan watched as workers poured dirt into the little canal running in front of his door. "The dirt came from the old city walls that were being pulled down at the same time," he says. More canals in the neighborhood, as well as elsewhere in Suzhou, were filled up for the construction of roads in the 1950s and, later, in the 1970s, air-raid shelters.

"Whatever time it takes to make an ancient canal disappear, it takes ten times longer to put it back on the map," says Ruan, reflecting on the more recent history of the Zhongzhangjia River (canal) that once ran alongside the Zhongzhangjia Lane to the east of the Pingjiang Road, before it, too, was filled up in the 1950s. In 2005, three years after the establishment of the Pingjiang Historic District, construction commenced on the canal's site and lasted for the next 15 years, until water started to run the same course again, in the spring of 2020.

Today, the Zhongzhangjia lane and canal constitute a major attraction within the Pingjiang Historic District, which, on an average day in early summer, is crowded with visitors, including many young women donning period costumes with the intention of getting the perfect pictures.

The scene is a far cry from what Suzhou was left with when, in 1130, the city was ravaged by nomadic Jurchen troops from the north, who were an archnemesis of the Song court.

According to Pei, in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy — the Jurchen army didn't stay — the governor of Suzhou ordered every boat leaving the city be loaded with debris from the canals, so that the waterways, which Pei calls "the city's blood vessels", could be declotted and put back into use as soon as possible.

Yet, the rebuilding required much more prolonged and assiduous effort: when Pingjiang Tu was made in 1229 to record the results of the effort, 99 years had passed.

"For its contemporaries, the map was a display of resilience. For us, and every visitor to the Pingjiang Historic District, it's a reminder that whatever the city has been subjected to in history, it always bounces back."

For Ruan Yisan, an elder brother of Ruan Yongsan and one of China's leading preservationists, the waterways are time tunnels leading to much-cherished childhood memories, when his family was living on the Niujia Lane.

"In the summer, boatloads of watermelons would be arriving at our doorstep; in the winter, it would be stacks of soft hay which we put underneath our bedding," he says.

Ruan Yisan first became involved in the planning for the Pingjiang Historic District as far back as the late 1980s. Later, in the early 2000s, when work on the project, long in the hatching, was expedited, Ruan Yisan, who taught urban planning at Shanghai's Tongji University, started to spend more and more time in Suzhou.

"As an underwriter of the project, my brother makes sure that it's an ongoing process. What he has been trying to do consistently is to retain the area's many layers of history, without turning it into a showpiece trapped in a time capsule," says Ruan Yongsan, who, at the time working with Suzhou's housing and urban-rural development bureau, saw his own work intersecting with that of his brother's.

"Around 20,000 people are today living inside the historical district, of whom 60 percent are longstanding residents," continues Ruan Yongsan.

According to Pei, the historical district received a record 28.35 million visits last year.

It's true that the neighborhoods are no longer as quiet as they once were, yet, despite the availability of tap water, some still prefer the time-honored ritual of hoisting water from the depths of a well, knowing all too perfectly that the Pingjiang Road was once named "Shi Quan Li", meaning "Ten Well Lane".

"'Row, row, row your boat, to grandma's bridge …' that's the rhyme I grew up singing," says Ruan Yisan. "As long as the waters and bridges are here, we keep the memory of our grandmothers alive."

Contact the writer at zhaoxu@chinadaily.com.cn