An Evening At GuanQian Street Of SuZhou

A winter travel experience continues. After our first stop to Lion Grove Garden in SuZhou, we headed straight to the local popular shopping street, or they call it pedestrian precinct, GuanQian Street (观前街).

Predestrian precinct has become a popular tourist attraction recently in China where the whole motor road is being converted as pedestrian walkway and cars are banned from passing through. Along the pedestrian precinct are various shopping outlets, restaurants, branded boutiques and etc. There are at least one of these found in every major city in China, like Guan Qian street in SuZhou, Fu Zhi Miao in Nanjing and Nanjing Street in Shanghai. We went all these on our Shanghai and South Yangtzi China tour. This was also when we started to dispute with our tour leader on our night excursion. Talk about it later.

As we covered quite an extensive areas with 5 cities of South Yangtze China, there was a local tour guide joined us in SuZhou who was more familiar with her own city of course. Oops! Did I mention ‘her’? Yes, She is a local SuZhou lady. “AiYoYo” is the local dialect to best describe her which means beautiful. 🙂 She brought us to this pedestrian precinct where is the local favourites.

Guan Qian Street is quite different from Nanjing Street in Shanghai in terms of targetted consumer. While Nanjing Street is an upmarket shopping area, GuanQian Street on the other hand is . It features mainly local products from snacks, foods, fashion to beautiful local people (should have taken photos on some sexy local ladies…. if my wife was not along. 🙂 ).

The local tour guide recommended us to try out those many local snacks from this shop… Here we started our real local food hunt after 3 days of hit and run…

And these were some of our trophies! (Nuts, sweets, cakes and plums) Bravo! We bought packs after packs for our souvenirs to colleagues, friends and relatives.

I also tried the smelly bean curb (臭豆腐), smoked jelly fish and jelly fish balls from this stall! Highly recommended!

GuanQian pedestrian precinct had impressed me a lot on cleanliness of its walkway, shops and stalls (in fact all other pedestrian precincts in our tour as well).

Local brand names dominated GuanQian Street with many shops selling leather boots and jackets, which were recommended as ‘Best Buy’ items by our tour leader.

Beautiful evening weather and ambient lighting. Though it was only 4:30pm, dusk came earlier in Winter and sky was turning dark rapidly.

My biggest discovery of all in this trip to SuZhou was this shop. Founded some 80 years ago, “LiLiXiang” is the first shop to bring in TianJing chestnut to SuZhou. I’m a big fan of chestnut, it nearly made me crazy when our tour guide told me LiLiXiang is the most famous shop selling sugar fried chestnut in SuZhou. It is the local favourite as well. We had to queue up for 10 minutes to buy 4 packs.

A little introduction of LiLiXiang was posted on the wall.

Priced at RMB19 per 600g (or a large pack), we bought 4 packs and just see how my wife enjoyed it on the bench while waiting for fellow group members… 🙂

We left GuanQian Street for our dinner at 6:30pm. Noticed that? GuanQian Street was supposed to be part of our add-on night excursion and it should be filled up our free time after dinner, not before dinner! What had happened? What would we do after dinner? Which part of the tour itineraries had been cut short by our tour leader so she could sign off earlier? We had an argument with our tour leader Ah Mei on the arrangement. We made our point very clear to her: We didn’t mind if certain travel attractions were being cut short as long as our time in China could be fully utilised! Conclusion? Ah Mei agreed to bring us out after dinner for foot reflexology and full body message sessions! 🙂

After all, SuZhou night scene was no exceptionally gorgeous and sexy… – Travel Feeder.

All above photos were captured by Panasonic Lumix Fz28

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.