nanjing.

After two days of socialiting in Shanghai, Stephanie and I took the train to Nanjing. It would be both of our first visits to the historical capital, located 300 kilometers west of Shanghai, in neighboring Jiangsu province. ('Jing' is Chinese for 'capital'; Nan-jing = 'Southern Capital', Bei-jing = 'Northern Capital, and the Chinese word for Tokyo is Dong-jing - 'Eastern Capital'.)
We booked two nights at a hostel perched on the periphery of Fuzi Miao , an ancient site of Confucian worship turned, like so many other Chinese historical temples, into a glitzy nighttime bazaar.
We spent the afternoon first noshing on street meat, and then checking out the expansive, dauntingly, -almost inappropriately- hip Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum. A modern sculpture garden snaked between the stylized, industrial edifices that housed everything from Japanese wartime propaganda to excavated mass burial sites.


Following the museum, we scooted to the ancient city wall ruins to the north. Each brick - dating back ~600 years to the early Ming Dynasty - is engraved with a seal bearing the name of the bricklayer and the supervising inspector, allegedly so that should invading marauders break down the wall, the emperor could punish the responsible parties. My personal partiality towards accountability enjoys this story.


From there, we walked to Hunan Road, near Nanjing University, for dinner.


We took a break from Taiwanese fare - ancestral inclinations ruled Shanghai dining decisions - and opted for a more traditional mainland meal of stewed melons, noodles, salt-water duck, and a piquant peppercorn chicken dish that caused Stephanie to chug her tepid soda.



We strolled along the bustling pedestrian lane, sipping mango blackcurrant milk tea, until late, and dutifully retired.
We spent much of the next day taking one long, paved hike along the Purple Mountain Scenic area. Here there were temple courtyards and nine-layered pagodas offering vistas of various reserves:





It also featured several Sun Yat-Sen museums and memorials (including a hilly mausoleum), the founding father of Chinese democracy.


We'd just about had enough of sightseeing, but the promenade along the Ming Dynasty imperial tombs too fun to pass up. Stone effigies of impish dragons, lions, camels, elephants, unicorns and horses had been erected some six hundred years earlier to guard the deceased royalty, although we agreed that the visages were too cute and smiley to ward off any evil spirits.





We settled in for an earlier dinner of Taiwanese diner staples - you tiao (resembling a salty churro), shao bing (sesame flatbread), niu ro mien (spicy beef-flavored broth noodles) and xiao long bao (itsy soup dumplings) - before calling it a day and catching an early train back to Shanghai.