Although the city of Suzhou was founded in the sixth century, during the Ming and Qing dynasties of the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries it flourished as the Florence of China, according to the architect Ieoh Ming Pei. Painters, scholars and poets were drawn to this cultural centre. Surrounding their courtyard houses, they constructed lush and highly stylised stroll gardens, with ponds, pavilions and elaborate rockeries symbolic of rural pathways, lakes and mountainous regions ...