Town bears tradition of painting

Xukou people also famed for creating gardens

A town with some 90,000 residents, Xukou is a small place. It's just one of the 15 divisions of Wuzhong, and Wuzhong is just one of the 10 district-level divisions of Suzhou. Xukou is 15 km away from the Suzhou downtown.

But Xukou's importance is much larger. If you know the story of Suzhou, which goes that in 560 BC, during the Spring and Autumn period (770-476 BC), the lord of Wu commissioned a man called Wu Zixu ( 559-484 BC) to build a city for him in today's Suzhou, you may sense some connection there0: Xukou was named after Wu Zixu. And like Suzhou, it has a history dating back to more than 2,500 years ago.