Linguists say theWu dialect widely spoken in Shanghai, to take one prominent example, shares only about 31 percent lexical similarity with Mandarin, or roughly the same as English and French. The encounter at the Datian market began when the dumpling seller approached the foreigner with a phrase that sounded like "goodbye" in theWu dialect. Knowing it must mean something else, the foreigner guessed she was asking his name, and provided it, producing a laugh from the woman who explained, switching to Mandarin, that she had asked if he had eaten lately.
The finest private gardens were built in Suzhou, a graceful old city with a network of canals and a cultured ambiance. It was founded in the sixth century B.C. as the capital of the kingdom ofWu and flourished as a center of trade and scholarship under successive dynasties.
I deeply regretted having to miss seeing Hsing-ping, a very old town built by the ruler of theWu Kingdom in the Three Kingdoms period of the third century.
Although theChinese usage of Wu as aposthumous name is adjectival and should properly be translated—as, e.g., "the Martial Emperor of the Han dynasty"—or treated as an epithet in a similar manner to emperors called after their era names—as, e.g., "the Hongwu Emperor of the Ming dynasty"—it is much more common to encounter them in English sources treated as proper names—as, e.g., "Emperor Wu of the Han dynasty"—despite the Chinese meaning nothing of the sort.
