Changzhou First Time: Dinosaurs, a Poet's Last Home, and the Lakes Beyond

The city the poet refused to leave

In the summer of 1101, an old man came up the canal to Changzhou and never left. Su Shi — Su Dongpo — had just been pardoned after years of exile at the empire's far edges, most recently on Hainan island, and was travelling north toward a new posting he would never take up. He had been passing through Changzhou, on and off, for four decades: friends here, family connections here, poems written here. In his last years he had asked, more than once, to be allowed to retire to this mid-sized canal city between Suzhou and Nanjing. He died here that August, aged sixty-four, and Changzhou has been quietly proud of the fact for nine hundred years. Dongpo Park, down by the canal where his boat was moored, is still where the city goes to remember him — not with a theme park, but with a pavilion, a statue, and old men playing chess in the shade.

The poet was not an accident. Changzhou spent the Ming and Qing dynasties producing examination graduates at a rate far beyond its size, and its scholar quarter survives as Qingguo Lane, a canal-side street of courtyard houses a few minutes from the modern centre. Zhou Youguang, the linguist who led the creation of Hanyu Pinyin — the romanisation system that spells every Chinese name you have ever read — was a Changzhou man from this quarter. Comb-makers worked the lane beside his, at Bijixiang, and their craft made 'Changzhou combs' a byword across the empire. Layered over that old soul is a startlingly new economy: the same prefecture builds electric cars and batteries for the world — Li Auto's first factory stands in Wujin, battery-maker CALB is headquartered in Jintan, CATL produces in Liyang — and runs the theme park that started China's dinosaur craze in 2000.

That spread is why Changzhou defeats visitors who treat it as a dot on the Shanghai–Nanjing line. It is a prefecture, not a neighbourhood: the canal city with its temple, lane and dinosaur park; then, an hour south, Liyang's lakes, bamboo forest and hot springs; then, west, Jintan's Taoist mountain and a lantern-lit resort town built in its honour. Each of the three is a genuine day. This guide builds the first-timer's version honestly — the old city read slowly, the south and west given their own logistics instead of a hopeful taxi ride, and the poet kept where he belongs, at the centre of the story.

Four days across three geographies, in running order

Do it like a local

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How to run Changzhou, step by step

1. Step 1 — Read the map first: one prefecture, three geographies

   Every Changzhou mistake starts with the map, so start there yourself. The prefecture-level city administers five districts — Xinbei, Tianning, Zhonglou and Wujin forming the urban core, Jintan to the west — plus the county-level city of Liyang in the south. For a visitor these collapse into three geographies that do not mix inside one day. The canal city (Tianning, Zhonglou, Xinbei, Wujin) holds the temple, the scholar lane, the dinosaur park and the ancient ruin. Liyang, roughly 80 kilometres south, is lakes, bamboo and hot springs under low green hills. Jintan, about 40 kilometres west, is the Taoist mountain country of Maoshan. Plan one geography per day, choose a base for each — the old town for the city days, a Liyang lakeside room for the south, a night inside Salt Lake City for the west — and Changzhou stops being a pass-through and becomes a small, well-made journey of three or four days.

2. Step 2 — Arrive at the right station, because Changzhou has two that matter

   From Shanghai, the Shanghai–Nanjing intercity trains reach Changzhou in about an hour and deliver you to Changzhou Station, which sits at the edge of the old town — the right arrival if your hotel and your first day are in Tianning or Zhonglou. Fast trains on the Beijing–Shanghai high-speed line use Changzhou North instead, out in Xinbei District: less charming, but the sensible station for the Dinosaurs Park and for northern business districts, and connected to the centre by Metro Line 1, which opened in 2019 and runs the length of the city. Line 2 (2021) crosses it east–west through the old town, putting Qingguo Lane and Tianning Temple on the network. Benniu Airport (CZX), northwest of the city, handles domestic flights and a small set of regional ones; most international visitors will simply arrive by rail. Before booking anything, pin your hotel to the station you will actually use — the two stations are 10 kilometres apart and the wrong one quietly taxes every day of the trip.

3. Step 3 — Give the temple its morning: Tianning and Hongmei Park

   Begin the old city at Tianning Temple, in the district named after it. This is one of Chinese Buddhism's noted Chan temples, rebuilt in bright timber-and-gold style, and its pagoda — over 150 metres of stacked eaves — is the vertical landmark of the whole centre. Entry is ¥20 (07:30–16:30); the pagoda climb costs extra and is best done first, in the cool and the quiet, before tour groups thicken. What foreigners consistently underrate is the free park attached to the temple's east side: Hongmei Park, named for its red plum blossoms, is where Changzhou actually spends its mornings — tai chi on the lawns, chess under the trees, amateur opera practice by the pavilion, grandparents exercising grandchildren. Do the temple as a sight and the park as a society, in that order, and you will understand the city better by 10 a.m. than a day of monuments would teach you. The Changzhou Museum stands a short ride north in Xinbei's civic quarter — free, modern, and the right rainy-hour substitute — but it is a support act, not the morning's headline.

4. Step 4 — Walk the scholar lane: Qingguo, the combs, and the poet at dusk

   Late morning belongs to Qingguo Lane, reached from Wenhua Gong metro station in about five minutes. The street itself — grey-brick courtyard houses along a willow-hung canal — is free and always open, but time your visit for the halls: the preserved residences and small museums inside open 09:30–17:30 and close entirely on Mondays. This was the city's examination aristocracy in brick form, the lane that produced officials, scholars and, in the twentieth century, Zhou Youguang, whose Pinyin system now writes 'Changzhou' on every map you own. Cross to Bijixiang — Comb Lane — where workshops have cut, carved and painted wooden combs for centuries; Changzhou combs were tribute goods, and a hand-finished boxwood comb from a working shop is the one souvenir here with real lineage. Then follow the old-city canal east as the light drops to Dongpo Park, where a pavilion marks the mooring of Su Dongpo's boat. The park is small, free and entirely unforced — the correct emotional register for the place where China's most life-loving poet came ashore for the last time.

5. Step 5 — Eat the old city properly, and drink its tea

   Changzhou cooking sits inside the Jiangsu tradition — precise, lightly sweet, proud of knife work — and the old town feeds a first-timer well if you order its own signatures rather than generic greatest hits. Silver-thread noodles (yin si mian) are the local emblem: dough cut so fine it threads a needle, served in a clear, serious broth. Da ma gao, the sesame cake from Nandajie, is the breakfast of record; dried radish shreds and crab-and-tofu combinations appear on every honest local menu. In the Qingguo Lane and Nandajie area you are eating where the city eats, in rooms that have served the same dishes for decades — point at the local specials section, ask what the kitchen is proud of, and let lunch run long. Tea matters here too: the prefecture's hills grow well-regarded green and white teas (Liyang's white tea has its own following), and a pot of local tea with the noodles is not ambience, it is part of the cuisine. Save your appetite for spectacle, though — the prefecture's most famous dish is waiting two days south, in Liyang.

6. Step 6 — Do the dinosaur park like you mean it (Xinbei family day)

   China Dinosaurs Park, up in Xinbei near Changzhou North station and served by Metro Line 1, is not a garnish on the city day — it is a full day that families should give its own slot. This was China's first dinosaur theme park (opened 2000, now 5A), and its structure is smarter than the genre suggests: start inside the museum, where a nearly complete Sinosauropteryx — the feathered dinosaur that rewrote textbooks — hangs with Brachiosaurus and Hadrosaurus skeletons, because the museum is both the park's intellectual core and its least queued hour if you enter at the 09:00 opening. Then work outward to the rides: the Dinoconda 4D coaster is the headline, the Crossing Jurassic flume the family's shared memory. Book ahead online (¥220–240 typical) rather than paying the ¥260 gate price, and in summer consider the extended night session, when the park runs to about 21:00, the heat breaks and the Dino Water Town street outside the gate — free to enter, dense with food — becomes the evening plan. Beside the park, the Dino Valley hot springs make a plausible soft landing for grandparents while the children finish the rides.

7. Step 7 — The other Wujin: stand inside a 2,500-year-old city (or meet its animals)

   South of the centre, Wujin District holds the prefecture's oldest thing and one of its loudest. The oldest is Yancheng: not the salt city of northern Jiangsu, but a Spring-and-Autumn-period walled settlement whose three concentric moats still hold water, ring inside ring, in a pattern Chinese archaeologists describe as unique among surviving ground-level city sites of its era. There are no towers to photograph — the city is earthwork, water and reeds, read through its exhibition hall — and that subtlety is the point: you are standing in the footprint of a city plan older than the Roman Republic. Tradition ties the site to Jizha, the Wu prince who gave Changzhou its earliest fame for integrity. Immediately beside the ruin, sharing its visitor infrastructure, sits the Yancheng safari park, a drive-through and walk-through zoo that could not be more different in register. The pairing makes an honest half-day choice: scholars and photographers take the moats slowly; families with young children take the animals; groups with both constituencies split the difference and meet at the gate. Note, as you cross Wujin, the scale of its new industry — this is Li Auto's Changzhou base district — though the plants are context for the drive, not attractions.

8. Step 8 — Go south properly: Liyang's lake, its soup, its bamboo sea

   Liyang is a separate expedition with its own railhead: fast trains on the Nanjing–Hangzhou line stop at Liyang station, from which the lake and bamboo country is roughly a half-hour by road (treat exact times as approximate and confirm your transfer before you travel). Give the day a food-first shape. Tianmu Lake, a reservoir lake folded into green hills, is famous across Jiangsu for one dish — the clay-pot fish-head soup, a milky, pepper-warm broth built on the lake's bighead carp — and the correct first-timer's order is soup at a lakeside restaurant, then the Shanshuiyuan scenic area (¥120) for the boat-and-island version of the lake itself. In the afternoon, move to the Nanshan Bamboo Sea, where some 35,000 mu of bamboo run over the hills in green weather. The ¥90 gate is only the entry fee to the argument: the mini train (¥15 one-way), the ground cable car (¥80 return) and the chairlift (¥80 return) each take their cut, and the right strategy is to pick one mechanical assist for the ascent, walk the ridge and the panda hall at the top, and ride down. End at the Yushui Hot Spring (¥198) as the light fails, and sleep in Liyang — the lake district at night, emptied of day-trippers, justifies the room on its own.

9. Step 9 — Go west to the Taoists: Maoshan and the Salt Lake City

   Jintan's day belongs to Maoshan, the low, temple-dotted range that Taoism counts among its founding landscapes — this is the home ground of the Shangqing school, and its temples (the summit palaces, the grottoes, the spring said to welcome guests) draw pilgrims as much as tourists. Plan the access with care, because the mountain is administered from two cities: the famous main gate and its published tariffs (around ¥100 peak, ¥80 off-season, plus the scenic bus) belong to the Jurong side, while Jintan's own sites on the southern slopes ticket separately, and the two sides' tickets have not historically been interchangeable — recent combo passes exist, so verify at booking exactly which gates your ticket opens. From the mountain, descend in the late afternoon to Oriental Salt Lake City in the Maoshan resort area: a purpose-built, lantern-lit Taoist fantasy town of streets, theatres and water shows, with a standard full-day ticket of ¥150 and cheaper afternoon entry for the night programme. It is staged, knowingly and well — treat it as an evening at the theatre rather than a heritage site, stay in one of its inns if you can, and the town at dawn, empty and misty over its lake, will repay the room rate. Jintan town itself adds quiet footnotes for those with time: it is the hometown of mathematician Hua Luogeng and, today, the headquarters town of battery maker CALB — the prefecture's past and future sharing one small city.

10. Step 10 — Leave like a hinge city: Changzhou inside a bigger delta trip

    Changzhou's last virtue is positional. It sits on the densest high-speed-rail corridor on earth, roughly an hour from Shanghai in one direction and inside an hour of Nanjing in the other, with Suzhou and Wuxi as near neighbours eastward — which makes it the natural decompression stop in a Yangtze Delta itinerary: the place you insert between the mega-city and the garden cities to slow the trip down without emptying it. Budget it honestly: two days for the canal city and the dinosaurs, one for Liyang, one for Jintan is the full four-day version; with only two days, take the old city and one of the three outer days rather than compressing all of them. International visitors entering on the 240-hour transit policy can work Changzhou into a Jiangsu loop with Nanjing and Suzhou without backtracking. And when you leave, leave from the right station — old town trips end at Changzhou Station; northbound high-speed departures may belong to Changzhou North. The poet stayed forever. You, with better transport, get to promise yourself a second visit instead.

Where the Changzhou trip goes wrong

Sources and status

Prices, schedules and booking channels change. Recheck the details that matter before you travel.

• Wikipedia — ChangzhouVerifiedCity overview: districts and county-level divisions, Zhou Youguang's birthplace, the Yancheng triple-moated site, metro opening dates — checked 2026-11-01
• Wikipedia — China Dinosaurs ParkVerifiedThe park's 2000 opening, museum collection including Sinosauropteryx, ride list, Dino Water Town and hot springs — checked 2026-11-01
• Wikipedia — Su ShiVerifiedBiographical record confirming Su Shi's death in Changzhou in 1101 after his pardon from the Hainan exile — checked 2026-11-01