Thirty minutes later, the hi-tech white snake slipped effortlessly out of Suzhou's dusty station, depositing me in the midst of China's new reality: ongoing metropolitan development guided by a need to confront the demands of the future without needlessly stopping off in the present.

Suzhou is a study in 21st-century urban planning, one that graduate students from Canberra to Kansas will no doubt discuss for decades. Three key issues dominate the debate: economic growth, urban migration and tourism overload. What goes around comes back around, and one of China's most affluent, culturally rich and technologically advanced cities during the Ming and Qing dynasties desires to sit once again at the top table. Hence, a sizeable chunk of land encircling the train station is being redeveloped, as is much of the city.

Thus far, Suzhou has resisted the temptation to convert its downtown area into an architectural skyjam. Instead, its office and residential towers, and many of the new hotels, are clustered around the powerhouse industrial parks to the east and west, which drive the city's economic growth.

The historic old city-with its mystical UNESCO heritage gardens, low-slung whitewashed, grey-roofed houses and Marco Pol's omnipresent "Venice of the East" epithet-is pure tourism gold, and must be treated as such. But as visitor numbers swell and the luxury brands descend-both Gucci and Armani open here this spring-Suzhou needed a grounding link between its artistic legacy and future ambition.

Enter Ieoh Ming (IM) Pei, who was inspired to become an architect by the brooding art-deco brilliance of Hudec's Park Hotel on Shanghai's People's Square. The 90-year-old Guangzhou-born architect-whose resume includes grafting a glass pyramid onto the Louvre in Paris and creating buildings as diverse as Hong Kong's Bank of China Tower, the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC and the Museum of Islamic Art in Qatar-had previously built just one building in the Chinese mainland, the Fragrant Hills Hotel in Beijing. But the lure of working in Suzhou-his family's ancestral home-was strong.

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