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It was a hot and humid Saturday morning in Suzhou, but the uncomfortable weather didn't stop tourists and locals from visiting Suzhou Museum, an unusual angular white-and-gray building, designed by architect Ieoh Ming Pei, better known as I.M. Pei.

Completed in October 2006, the museum covers 10,700 square meters, including a 5,000-square-meter exhibition space, a 200-seat auditorium, a research library and several Chinese gardens. It contains a number of significant cultural relics and has become one of the most highly regarded regional museums in China.

"He used the geometrical form as his basic element and repeated the theme throughout," said Jia Beisi, Associate Professor of architecture at the University of Hong Kong. "The design looks like a big building cut into smaller pieces."

Whitewashed plaster walls with dark gray clay tiles are a traditional feature of Suzhou's architecture. The museum mirrors but doesn't copy this with its roof made of gray granite in uniform colors.

A modern steel structure replaces the traditional wooden roof beam of Suzhou. The interior is decorated with wooden frames beneath a white ceiling. In addition, metal sunscreens with wooden panels make the building more flexible to changes in natural light, a skillful creation by I.M. Pei who has been given the nickname "magician of light."

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The high-tech hub Suzhou, in East China's Jiangsu Province, and the Chinese University of Science and Technology (USTC) won the bid to hold the 2008 Robot World Cup Soccer Games (RoboCup), the world's most renowned intelligent robotics competition.

According to Yang Baoguo, USTC spokesman, the joint bid by USTC and Suzhou, the technological and the financial sponsor, beat several competitors.

"It is the first time this world class robotics competition has come to China. It will surely motivate the spirits of thousands of robotics fans in the country," Yang said.

Yang also said the Chinese team, made up of scientists from 20 Chinese universities, won nine gold medals out of 33, second only to the German team, which won 11 gold medals at the 10th RoboCup, which concluded yesterday in Bremen, Germany.

About 2,500 scientists from 36 nations participated in the week-long 2006 Bremen RoboCup.

According to Chen Xiaoping, a renowned information technology expert with USTC, RoboCup is an international research and education initiative aimed at fostering artificial intelligence (AI) and intelligent robotics research.

The Suzhou-Nantong Yangtze Road Bridge, the world's largest cable-stayed bridge, was formally opened on Monday in east China's Jiangsu Province after five years of construction.

The bridge, linking the two prosperous cities of Nantong and Suzhou, runs 32.4 kilometers, with 8,146 meters spanning the Yangtze, China's longest waterway. It has three lanes each way. You Qingzhong, provincial director of transportation, said the bridge, serving as a major land link between Jiangsu and Shanghai, was expected to ease navigation problems caused by ferries in the Yangtze estuary and to promote economic growth in the Yangtze River Delta.

The bridge, 108 kilometers upstream from the Yangtze's mouth, joins the national highway network on the both banks. "The journey between Shanghai and Nantong now only takes one hour, but previously it took almost four hours, including the ferry trip," said You. "With the bridge, it takes just seven minutes to drive across the Yangtze."

The bridge had a month-long trail run before its official opening, which saw a daily flow of 20,000 to 30,000 vehicles, Xinhua news agency reported. About 10.7 million people visited Nantong last year, said Zhou Xiaoping, an official with the Jiangsu tourism bureau.

Built at a cost of 7.89 billion yuan (1.15 billion U.S. dollars), it is the most complicated bridge project in China's history, setting several technical records. It has the world's longest span of 1,088 meters, usurping the previous record holder, the Tatara Bridge in Japan, which has a main span of 890 meters. "The main navigational opening is 62 meters in height and 891 meters wide, which allows the passage of huge vessels with a cargo capacity up to 50,000 tonnes," said Wu Shouchang, chief engineer of the construction headquarters.

It also used the longest bridge cable of 577 meters, 100 meters longer than Tatara's record. Its steel and concrete towers, the tallest bridge towers in the world, stand at 300.4 meters. "The bridge is a good demonstration of China's scientific achievements in bridge construction over the past years," said Wu.

Source: CRIENGLISH / Xinhuanet 

An Environmentally themed park based on the history and renovation of Suzhou Creek has opened to the public for free today.

Mengqingyuan Park, covers 8.6 hectare, and is the third phase of a Suzhou Creek renovation project involving a green zone construction in 2004 and the Suzhou Creek Exhibition Center in 2005.

The park, at No. 66 Yichang Road in the middle of the creek, is equipped with models of the technology and equipment used in the creek and a hydrophilic bank showing the renovation of Suzhou Creek.

The nation's first rainwater reservoir is under the park collecting rain that would otherwise flow into the creek.

Under the third-phase work, the authorities have updated the three-story Suzhou Creek Exhibition Center with many new exhibits and hightech displays showing the 5,000 year history of the creek, the life of residents whom lived along the banks of the creek and the various species of fish that used to live in the waterway.

The exhibition shows how the once pristine waterway became heavily polluted in the 1920s and displays the city's efforts to clean up the creek over the past two decades.

The center is a building with its own history. It is the site of the former Shanghai Brewery which was built in 1912 and is a heritage building.

Experts from the Shanghai Science and Technology Commission, one of the park's builders, said the main purpose of the park is to promote education on environmental protection and arouse the awareness of the public, especially young people.

New technologies like decontamination of base dirt in the creek, pollutant treatment and water quality repair are under discussion and will be introduced, the experts said.

The 125-kilometer creek was once an ideal place for fishing, but rapid development lead to massive pollution during the 1970s. Local government set up a headquarters for the creek renovation in 1996. Since 1998, about 14 billion yuan (US$2.04 billion) has been invested in 23 renovation programs, which have improved the basic quality of the Creek.

Source: Shanghai Daily