Soochow is a city in Jiangsu province, famous for its canals, its classical gardens, and its silk industry. Marco Polo described it in the thirteenth century. It has been a center of Chinese culture for over two thousand years. Its name in Chinese is Sūzhōu. In pinyin, it is Suzhou.
English inherited Soochow from the Wade-Giles romanization, where sū became soo and zhōu became chow. The same mapping that turned dòufu into toufu and gōngfu into kongfu turned Sūzhōu into Soochow. The pattern is consistent. And consistently wrong.
Suzhou is now the standard spelling on maps, in airline schedules, and in all official Chinese publications. The switch from Soochow to Suzhou in English-language media happened gradually through the 1980s and 1990s. But Soochow persists in historical texts, in older travel writing, and in the names of a few institutions that were founded during the treaty port era and never updated their English names.
A student researching Chinese garden design will encounter Soochow in a twentieth-century book and Suzhou in a twenty-first-century article. The research requires an extra cognitive step: realizing that these are the same place. That step is unnecessary. It is an artifact of a romanization system that has been obsolete for nearly fifty years.
Suzhou is five letters. Soochow is seven. The pinyin version is shorter, more accurate, and internationally recognized.
Our Recommendation: Suzhou. Historic city, modern spelling.