Suzhou Embroidery

Suzhou embroidery is one of the four famous embroideries in China with a history of more than 2,000 years. Suzhou embroidery enjoyed an enable reputation for its elegant, neat characteristics and excellent craftsmanship. Suzhou embroidery is flat and smooth on surface, neat, well stitched and even, and bright in color and has attained a high artistic level. Suzhou embroidery works have been exhibited in more than a hundred countries and regions, and have attracted thousands of spectators who have highly praised the exquisite workmanship and reputed the Suzhou embroidery as the pearl of the orient art. It includes double-face embroidery, single-face embroidery, random-stitch embroidery and some other hand-woven needlecrafts.
The double-sided embroidery has high reputation for its superb patterns, tasteful colors and matchless execution. It is a gem among the embroidery arts with its vivid and absolutely lifelike themes. Embroidered works are highly complex works today. Some masterpiece like the portrait of the Queen of the U.K took the embroiders several months using ten-odd stitches and silk threads in more than a thousand different colors to complete. The best known pattern of perfection in Suzhou embroidery are kitten and gold fish, the artist use 20 different colored silk threads to embroider one eye of a cat and splits the hair-thin colored silk thread into 48 filaments to embroider the tail of a gold fish.

Suzhou Style Bonsai

Suzhou is a city known for its long history and cultural tradition. Its achievements in classical landscape architecture over the past dynasties and the paintings of the Suzhou School in Ming have provided a constant source of inspiration for its potted landscape gardening to draw on.
Tree stumps are used as chief material in Suzhou's potted landscape gardening. Some of them are decades or even hundreds of years old and their branches have withered and crooked, given a strange and picturesque look by the workings of Nature. Some even seem to be dead and rotten and are regarded as useless. However, transplanted in pots and handled carefully, they will put forth green and luxuriant foliage. Hanging low or shooting upwards, many are beautiful by nature and have a high decorative value. Put in old-looking pots and stands, they are given a flavor of antiquity. Hence the unique classic elegance and simplicity of Suzhou's potted landscape, which are both life-like and artistically suggestive.
Dating far back to Tang and Sung Dynasties and flourishing in Ming and Qing Dynasties, Suzhou's potted landscape gardening has continued to develop in our times. Early in Qing, it already attained the artistic standards of traditional Chinese landscape painting.

Silk

Suzhou has long been known as the hometown of Silk. Suzhou Silk is world-famous for its magnificent quality, colors and numerous varieties. It is the most outstanding native produce of Suzhou. Suzhou Silk has a long history and its integrated production capacity of weaving, spinning and apparel making, mainly producing fabrics of pure silk, mixed woven silk and chemical filament for exportation with more than 30 items. The most famous are the fine tough silk and pure silk crepe. Having a lot of key enterprises in Chinese silk industry, Suzhou plays a very important role in producing and exporting silk. It has wide range of fabrics and high flexibility of production with annual exported value more than US$80 million. Their top quality, high grade and excellent flexibility, especially suitable for making various clothes, fashion and scarves characterize the Suzhou silk fabrics. Silk industry of Suzhou has developed a modern mass production scale and become the mainstay of China's silk export with superior quality and output.
Suzhou Silk enjoys a remarkable fame at home and abroad. It is one of the best sell items in tourist shopping.

Suzhou Fans

Suzhou's arts & crafts represent a unique cultural style and workmanship developed over 1,000 years under the influence of the Wu Culture and skills of generations of artisans. Marked by exquisite craftsmanship and elegant design and color, all the products are warmly acclaimed in China and overseas. Of most representatives are embroidery, fans, national musical instruments, mahogany furniture, jade carving, silk tapestry, etc.

Suzhou Fan is a big family with great varieties. Suzhou Fans may date back to the East Jin Dynasty (317-- 420 AD) when the famous imperial palace tissue fans were not popular among the common people. In about 13th century, the scholars made a very good use of the tissue part of a fan for calligraphy and painting. At the same time, the making of folding fans also burst into full blossom. They applied very special technique in making the folding fan, of which the carefully-polished bamboo ribs were shinning and lovely and the alum-treated paper coverings never sot rotten while immersed in water. They were not only the articles for daily use but also the works of art widely used for decoration, exchange, gift and collection. Besides that, there are also palm-leaf fans, wheat straw fans and ivory fans.

The best known Suzhou Fan probably is the sandalwood fan. Its most outstanding characteristic is its subtle fragrance omitted from the wood, which is enchanting and refreshing as expensive perfumes. In summer time, you get nice fragrance with a sandalwood fan in hand, which refreshes the air and clears your head. To make the sandalwood fans more exquisite and lovely, the craftsmen use fret saws to cut out elegant designs and electrical irons to burn landscapes, human figures, flowers and animals on the fan-ribs when making them. Another one worth to mention is the smallest micro fan in the world which has 300 poems carved on 2 square centimeters of an ivory fan, total in 14, 000 Chinese characters.