Wuzhong District

Tiger Hill (Huqiu) is the iconic landscape feature of southwestern Suzhou. The hill is small (only 36m high) but contains layered Wu-state, Buddhist, and Ming-imperial heritage in a tightly compressed area. The leaning Yunyan Pagoda at the summit, built in 961 CE, is one of the oldest surviving brick pagodas in southern China; its lean (about 2.34 m off vertical) is the eastern Chinese counterpart to the Pisa tower and has been the subject of 20th-century structural-stabilisation work.

The hill's connection to the Wu kingdom is the burial site of King Helu (495 BCE) — though the actual tomb has never been excavated, the substantial reservoir-like sword-pool below the pagoda is reputed to mark the entrance. The site combines Buddhist temple complex (with halls dating to the Ming and Qing), classical scholar-poet inscriptions on rock faces, and the leaning pagoda landmark.

Han Shan Temple, west of Tiger Hill near the Caoxie Canal, is one of the most poetically-famous Buddhist temples in China — the subject of Zhang Ji's Tang-dynasty poem "Mooring at Maple Bridge at Night," which every educated Chinese person memorises. The temple's bell, tolled 108 times at midnight on Chinese New Year's Eve, is the source of the modern Suzhou New Year bell-ringing tradition.

The Lingering Garden (Liu Yuan), in the eastern Wuzhong/Gusu district overlap, is one of the four great UNESCO classical Suzhou gardens. Its 23 buildings interconnected by covered walkways create the most architecturally elaborate of the canonical Suzhou gardens.