Founded in 514 BCE as the capital of the kingdom of Wu, Suzhou grew into the commercial and cultural heart of Jiangnan. Its position on the Grand Canal made it a hub of silk production, publishing, and long-distance trade, while its gardens, theatres, restaurants, and guild halls sustained one of the most refined urban cultures of late imperial China. The nineteenth century brought rupture: the city was occupied by Taiping forces from 1860 to 1863 and much of it was destroyed. Recovery unfolded in the shadow of Shanghai, which had displaced Suzhou as the region's economic centre. Suzhou was opened as a treaty port in 1896 under the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki, with a Japanese concession established the following year on the southern edge of the walled city. The arrival of the railway in 1906 and successive programmes of municipal reform reshaped streets, policing, and public space, until the Japanese occupation of 1937 to 1945 interrupted them. Studying Suzhou across these transitions offers a way to observe how an old Chinese city absorbed, resisted, and redirected the forces of modern change.
This platform brings together in one place the documentation assembled on Suzhou by the research team at the Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, under the direction of WU Jen-shu. It is part of the Virtual Cities Project, a family of research platforms devoted to the modern history of cities in China and Southeast Asia, hosted by the TGIR Huma-Num.
The site currently offers three sets of materials. The map collection gathers thirty-nine documents, from the Gusu chengtu of 1745 to city plans of the Republican and early socialist periods, in Chinese, English, and French. It also includes thematic maps produced by the research team: the shifting geography of restaurants between the nineteenth century and 1945, the distribution of guild halls and trade associations, the location of banks and native banks in the 1920s, and the changing pattern of vacant land within the walls. The image collection holds one hundred and seventy-five photographs taken between the 1890s and the 1940s, documenting the city gates, the ring canal, Tiger Hill, the gardens, temples and the examination compound, mission and municipal schools, and scenes of everyday work and leisure. The e-library provides full-text access to reference works, travel accounts, and scholarship, complemented by a bibliography on the city and its region.
All materials can be searched by keyword or browsed by collection, and may be used freely for private research and teaching under the terms set out in our terms of use. We welcome contributions of maps, images, and documents on Suzhou, as well as corrections to existing records. Please write to us through the contact page.
Last update on Thursday 30 July 2026 (11:36) by C. Henriot
Site created by Gérald Foliot - Hosted by TGIR HUMA-NUM
The site is part of the Virtual Cities Project: Beijing - Hankou - Saigon - Shanghai - Suzhou - Tianjin - Zhejiang
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