Nanjing, Capital Under the Ginkgos

Nanjing wears its capital past lightly, in ginkgo avenues and city walls rather than in noise; the plane trees planted along Zhongshan Avenue in the 1920s still roof half the city centre in green. The Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang made it his capital in 1368 and left the longest surviving city wall in the world — some twenty-five kilometres of it still standing, climbable at Zhonghua Gate, whose layered barbicans could swallow an army. His tomb, the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, lies on the wooded flank of Purple Mountain, approached along a spirit way of stone elephants, camels and officials that is at its finest under yellow ginkgo leaves in November.

The same mountain holds the granite stairway of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum and the restored Linggu Temple with its beamless brick hall. Down in the city, the Qinhuai River slides past the rebuilt Confucius Temple quarter, where lantern-lit pleasure boats and snack streets recall the examination candidates who once crammed in the Jiangnan Examination Hall next door. The Presidential Palace traces the Republic; the Nanjing Massacre Memorial confronts 1937 with sobering clarity. The Nanjing Museum, second only to Beijing's, fills a Liao-style hall with imperial porcelain and a recreated Republican-era street.

Eat salted duck, pale and faintly floral, plus duck-blood-and-vermicelli soup, soup dumplings and osmanthus-scented sweets in autumn. Xuanwu Lake fills a corner of the wall with willows and rowing boats, and Qixia Temple burns red with maples in late November. Nanjing is close enough to Shanghai to pair naturally with Suzhou and Huangshan on a Jiangnan route through eastern China.