Suzhou is a city in Jiangsu province, famed for its beautiful gardens and traditional waterside architecture. The town has many canals and has been called the Venice of the East. An older romanisation was "Soochow".
Suzhou is a prefecture-level city in the Chinese system of administration, which makes the name "Suzhou" somewhat ambiguous; it can refer either to the city or to the entire administrative area.
Suzhou has always been a major center of Wu culture which developed in the region around Lake Tai.
The area was settled much earlier, but the city walls that defined what we now know as Suzhou were built in the late 6th century BCE. By 100 CE Suzhou was one of the ten largest cities on Earth, and by the early 19th century it was the world's largest non-capital city.
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