Only a 40-minute ride away from Shanghai on the bullet train, Suzhou is an ancient city whose antique core has fared better than many during the recent ferro-concrete revolution. Visitors travel here from Shanghai to wander around the old city’s network of cobbled streets and tree-lined canals, with their pretty stone bridges and elegant merchants’ houses.

Some of China’s loveliest classical gardens have survived too, spanning a period of a thousand years when wealthy local administrators and traders competed with each other to create the most delicate, refined havens. Encorporating rockeries, water features, miniature hills, pagodas and pavilions, they’re considered among the finest examples of landscape art in the country and have been widely copied.