Fuciao Village, Suzhou

1. looking east. connecting with the Grand Canal
2. Looking west towards Dushu Lake

3. looking north. Fuciao Temple. last remnant of Fuciao Cun village

I was lost and about to return to Suzhou when the road took a turn and the bus came up and over a bridge to expose a long view of an expansive lake. On its banks, a  temple, bathed in evening light shone out. It was the only moment of colour in the bare landscape. To its south lay a swath of newly leveled earth, to the north the wide muddy lake. 

I hopped off the bus to take a closer look. The temple is accessed across a canal via an old stone slab

bridge. The new elevated roadway presses hard up against the foot of the old bridge so that to cross, you must first bow to clear the new bridge before taking to the old one. Once across, two small lions guard the wooden doors painted red. Though the yellow walls were newly painted, the doors are bolted shut.

A young man claimed the temple keeper had long since passed away. He had never been inside, nor had the man carrying groceries home at the bus stop. An old man out back who’s memory might have been more generous proved otherwise. With a nervous smile of silver teeth and a near indecipherable dialect, he explained that he was a guest worker from the hinterland. 

Across the road, North American-like housing rolled out to accommodate Chinese-scaled demographics have replaced village rice polders. We know this from Google Earth images taken only two years ago. The images also tell that the temple once served a village, since raised to make way for the new road. It identifies the lost village as Fuciao Cun, Pontoon Bridge Village, located on a trunk waterway that connects the Grand Canal with the Wusong River.

The violent erasure of Fuciao Village and the survival of its temple provoke both an urgent and critical response to contemporary Chinese urbanism and a faith rooted in a powerful reconciliation of a vanished village with its environment. The manner in which the high temple roof alters the horizon and how the water mirrors its golden walls once described a location for Fuciao Village between sky and water, and challenges New Fuciao to rationalize its place within a radically different context today.