Located in Suzhou, an ancient city popularly called "the Paradise on Earth", Soochow University is a key comprehensive provincial university in Jiangsu Province and also one of China's top 100 universities under the"Project 211" directed by the Ministry of Education. It was named after the city name Suzhou (spelt Soochow in the past) when founded in 1900, but according to the Pinyin spelling system it is now often written as Suzhou University (Suzhou Daxue or Suda in short).