The City West: the Memorial Hall, Stone City and Hexi

A walled Ming-and-Qing official building complex on a low hill inside the old Shuiximen gate, and the home of the Nanjing Municipal Museum - which calls its own site the largest and best-preserved Ming-Qing official building group surviving in the Jiangnan region. The permanent galleries are the ones to come for: 'Longpan Huju', a history of the city that won a national exhibition award, plus a treasures room built around the blue-and-white plum vase showing Xiao He chasing Han Xin, and a Song and Ming dress gallery in the Chongsheng Hall. 25 yuan gets you into the inner courtyards, 12.5 for concessions. Open 09:00-18:00, ticket office closes at 17:00, closed Mondays but open on public holidays. It is a twenty-minute ride east of the Memorial Hall and the obvious quiet afternoon after it.

A memorial built on the Jiangdongmen site where victims of the 1937 massacre were buried, opened on 15 August 1985 and now a national first-grade museum. Admission is free, but you cannot simply arrive: the museum's own statement of 16 August 2026 says its WeChat official account is the only booking channel, and a September 2026 notice repeats that every daily slot is released there and that there is no extra allocation at the gate. Booking is in your own name, 1-7 days ahead, with tickets released at 08:00; a passport is one of the accepted documents. Three exhibition areas - the Nanjing Massacre history exhibition, the 'Three Victories' exhibition next door, and the Lijixiang comfort station site across the city centre - are booked separately, and each visitor may book only once a month. It closes on Mondays, and in 2025 it closed for five weeks before the 13 December national memorial day.

A strip of park along the outer Qinhuai river below Qingliang Hill, where the Ming city wall was built straight onto a red sandstone cliff. One weathered outcrop reads as a face, and the pool below it gives the name the Ghost Face Looking in the Mirror. The name Stone City belongs to the Six Dynasties fortress, and that is the part to be careful with: the fortress has been dug up, but on the hill above and in the National Defence Park next door, not on the riverbank here. A city culture and tourism bureau piece of June 2026, reprinting the Nanjing City Wall Research Society, says the 2009-2012 season established that the site lies within Qingliang Hill Park and the National Defence Park and that the brick facings on the National Defence Park stretch were mostly first built under the Eastern Wu. It adds that a late Eastern Jin brick stamped with the two characters 'Shitou' came out of the 2016-17 dig. What you can see from this park is a Ming wall on an old cliff. Free, open ground, no booking.

Nanjing is not only old. West of the city wall the ground was farmland within living memory; now it is Hexi, a new town of towers and eight-lane roads that runs down to the Yangtze, and its riverbank has been made into an eleven-kilometre public park belt. The operating company divides it into four stretches - Wanjingyuan, the Green Expo garden, the International Youth Cultural Park, and the Yuzui and Yubei wetland parks - and the whole of Nanjing's riverfront system was linked up in August 2014. There is no ticket and nothing to book. Come here for an hour at the end of a heavy day, for a flat walk by a very wide river, and for a sense of what the newer side of this city looks like.

A classical garden round a lake just outside the line of the old Shuiximen gate, a few minutes' walk from Mochouhu station, on the same metro line as the Memorial Hall. The park authority puts it at about 51 hectares, of which the water is 32 - the second largest sheet of water inside the city after Xuanwu Lake. It was a Ming general's private garden: the Shengqi Lou, the pavilion where Xu Da is said to have beaten the first Ming emperor at chess, is still the centrepiece, and the Ming-dynasty scholar Zhu Zhifan listed it first among his forty views of Jinling. It has been free since 1 January 2022, when Jiangsu made it one of six classical gardens in a free-admission trial. The indoor halls keep museum hours and close on Mondays; the grounds do not.

A cable-stayed pedestrian bridge across the Jiajiang channel from the Hexi riverfront to Jiangxinzhou island, built for the 2014 Youth Olympics and named for the two leaning arches that read as an eye. There is nothing to buy and nothing to book: it is a public bridge, open 06:00 to 24:00 since 14 September 2023, when the operating company extended the old 07:00-22:00 window. Walk out to the middle for the Yangtze side channel, the Hexi towers behind you and the island ahead. In Hexi, this is a place worth making the walk for.

Eight Republican-era buildings called Puqing New Village, used by the Japanese army as comfort stations, and one of the few such sites identified by surviving victims themselves. It opened as a branch of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall in December 2015, was listed by the State Council among the eighth batch of major national heritage sites in October 2019, and named a third-batch national war-of-resistance memorial site in September 2020. Entry is free but booked, on the same WeChat official account as the main memorial and as a separate booking; the hall opens at 09:00, closes on Mondays, and admits visitors aged 14 and over only. It is not at Jiangdongmen - it stands in the middle of the old city, by Daxinggong on Metro Line 2, about 5 km from the main memorial.

The wooded hill behind the Stone City cliff, and the 'crouching tiger' of the old saying about Nanjing's terrain - 'Zhongshan coils like a dragon, Stone City crouches like a tiger', traditionally credited to Zhuge Liang. Before the Yangtze shifted west it came right up to the hill's southwest foot, which is where the cliffs came from and why a fort stood here. Under the Southern Tang it held a summer palace; today it holds the Qingliang Temple, the Chongzheng Academy, Zhuma Po and the Saoye Lou. The academy is the reason to come now: the district people's congress reports it reopened to the public in April 2025 after restoration, and the two viburnum trees in its courtyard had a fortnight of internet fame that spring. The other reason is the Six Dynasties Stone City archaeological display hall, up here rather than in the Stone City park below - this is where the excavated ramparts and the brick stamped 'Shitou' were found. Free and open ground; the City Wall centre's own holiday notices give the park 06:00-18:00 and its halls 09:00-17:00.