30th November: Nanjing, China

Nanjing was the capital under at least ten dynasties, intermittently from 220 to 1864. This included 276 years as the centre of the Ming Dynasty from 1368 to 1644. It is the third of the four great ancient capitals that we have visited, after Beijing and Xi’An, and will be our final foray into imperial China on this trip.

Our first full day in the southern capital began in gloriously warm autumn sunshine in the heart of the old imperial city. The tourist gates around Fuzimiao were all open for free entry and, despite it being the weekend, the streets were mercifully quiet. There were still a good number of the female visitors posing for photos in traditional Hanfu, as is very much in-vogue in any ancient Chinese city, but it’s very much off-season in Nanjing. We grabbed tea and coffee and set off wandering past the Confucius Temple and along a channel of the Qinhuai River. The autumn colours and peaceful vibe were exactly what we needed and allowed our minds to wander too, as we looked for creative photos along the way.

We decided that we should have a proper meal for lunch today. Kaja didn’t fancy anything fried, bready, or baos, which was quite the task at lunchtime in China when meat, eggs, and dairy are already off the cards! Amazingly, we stumbled across an Italian place. A salad and two bowls of tomato and mushroom noodles (sorry, spaghetti) were going down a treat until we found the special surprise of some beef hiding at the bottom! Who doesn’t love surprise meat in vegetarian dish!

It also took us most of the meal to realise that we were using forks! Apparently, we haven’t forgotten how they work after 6 weeks of exclusively using chopsticks for every meal.

One thing I realised today is that almost all of the children we see (90+ %) are roughly 7 or younger. They’re all also incredibly cute and I usually seem to end up playing with some each day as they love to come and say hello. What we don’t understand though is where the older kids are. Too much schoolwork? Playing games? Something else? If anyone knows, please let me know. On the rare occasions when we do see them, they are in vast school groups and are definitely no longer cute!

Nanjing’s Ming era city walls were the longest in the world and 25 km still exist to this day. We entered through the great Zhonghua Gate, sometimes called the Gate of China. The bastion was incredibly wide and the wall unfathomably tall. Apparently, just the initial inner walls took 280,000 workers over 20 years to construct. A cool little feature which is still visible today are the maker’s mark on some of the bricks.

Unlike most rectangular or circular city walls, Nanjing’s follow the topography of the hills and rivers. Indeed, we followed another branch of the Qinhuai along the southern edge of the wall. Kaja had been snack hunting again earlier and we had a tasty selection of hard-boiled tea sweets, mini Biscoff-like biscuits, crispy coconut chips, and cold jasmine tea to keep us moving. In the late afternoon autumn sunshine, the views were glorious over the old city rooves, with modern Nanjing beyond and yellow-orange trees separating new from old.

We caught the metro out through Changan Gate which we’d walked over an hour earlier, returning to the suburbs. Dinner at the local buffet was disappointing but nonetheless a cheap and relatively healthy way to refuel after another day of walking the streets.