Gulou, Yihe Road and Xinjiekou

A private museum on the eighth floor of a shopping mall at Xinjiekou, which sounds like a compromise and is not one. Founded by the Deji Group and open to the public since 2017, it holds nearly thirty years of collecting - Chinese ceramics, calligraphy and painting, Buddhist sculpture, classical furniture, and Chinese and international modern and contemporary art - and programmes exhibitions that treat Nanjing's own history as a subject rather than a backdrop. Its best-known piece of work is a digital reconstruction of the Qing scroll Jinling Tu, the painting that shows the city street by street. The practical reason to put it in a plan: it is open from 10:00 until midnight, seven days a week, Mondays included, and the entrance is one escalator above a mall at Xinjiekou, where metro lines 1 and 2 cross.

A free provincial art museum on Changjiang Road, and one of the easiest good hours in central Nanjing: no booking, no ticket, open Tuesday to Sunday. The institution traces itself to the National Art Gallery completed in August 1936 - by its own account China's first national-level art museum - and it still runs that building, less than 500 metres west at 266 Changjiang Road, as its exhibition hall; the old gallery is now a national-level protected heritage site. What you walk into at 333 is the 2010 building by the German practice KSP, about 10,600 square metres, holding rotating exhibitions from a collection of nearly 14,000 works. The museum's own visitor notice says neither building needs a booking and that you should bring an ID card, social security card or other valid document to swipe in - which, for a passport holder, is the one sentence to test before you rely on it.

The house at 1 Xiaofenqiao where John Rabe, the Siemens branch manager in Nanjing, lived from 1932 until 23 February 1938. On 22 November 1937 the foreigners who stayed behind in the city formed the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone and elected him chairman; the museum's own text says the committee protected the lives of about 250,000 people. The house is now a small memorial hall run by Nanjing University, on the Gulou campus side of Guangzhou Road, free, with no booking. It reopened on 7 December 2025 after the exhibition rooms were redone, and opens Tuesday to Sunday, 09:00 to 17:00, last entry 16:40. For a foreign visitor this is the most direct way into the 1937 story from the outside in, and it pairs with the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Hall across town - a small courtyard and a national memorial, in that order.

A 3,680-square-metre bookshop in a converted underground car park - originally a civil-defence shelter - under the Wutaishan sports centre, reached down a ramp off Guangzhou Road. It opened here in 2004, and the ramp with its painted double yellow line, the blue-green striped sign at the bottom of it and the wall of writers' portraits are why foreign media kept calling it China's most beautiful bookshop. Two things have changed and no guidebook has caught up: the blue-green shopfront sign came down on the night of 22 June 2025 for a redesign, and the large black cross that hung at the end of the ramp was removed in a refit in January 2026 and replaced by a lit shop logo. Where the sign used to be there is now a cast of Rodin's Thinker. By the next day (23 June), a notice at the door banned commercial photography, instant-film shoots and tripods, in the store and on the entrance ramp. Come for the books, the foreign-language shelves and the postcards. If you came for the photograph, the photograph is gone.

The Ming drum tower that gave this district, and the roundabout beside it, their name. Built in 1382 on a knoll in the middle of Zhu Yuanzhang's new capital, it kept the city's time and staged receptions; the city records office describes the base as a 44-metre-long, 22-metre-wide walled platform with three arched passages and a flight of forty stone steps up each side. What sits on top is not Ming: the timber hall was lost, and after the Kangxi emperor climbed the platform in 1684 the local officials put a stele pavilion there instead, which is why Nanjing people say 'Ming drums, Qing stele'. The platform and the small park around it - the park dates from 1923, and the new road system that boxed the tower into a traffic island came later - closed for conservation work on 16 June 2025 and reopened on 1 October 2025 with new hours: the park from 07:00, the interior of the tower from 08:00. Free, no booking, and about twenty minutes of your day.

The campus of Ginling College, China's first women's university at undergraduate level, founded by an American union of missions in 1913 and moved to this site off Ninghai Road in 1923. The layout is by the American architect Henry Killam Murphy with the Chinese architect Lü Yanzhi - who went on to design the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum - and it is the clearest surviving example of what they were trying to do: Chinese palace-style buildings in reinforced concrete, set symmetrically along an east-west axis around a great lawn and tied together by covered Chinese-style walkways. Behind Building 100 the ground opens into a garden built round an artificial lake, and the axis runs on up the western slope to finish at a Chinese pavilion. The municipal culture and tourism bureau calls it 'the most beautiful campus in the East'. It is now Nanjing Normal University's Suiyuan campus, and it is a working university - which is the whole problem of visiting it.

The old campus of the missionary-founded University of Nanking, now Nanjing University's Gulou campus, sitting between Hankou Road and Guangzhou Road in the middle of the district. Its landmark is the Northern Building - Beidalou - a grey brick tower with a clock face and a climbing curtain of ivy that turns red in November, and the reason most Chinese visitors queue for a campus pass. Two more things on these grounds matter to a foreign reader: the John Rabe House stands on the Guangzhou Road side, and the Pearl S. Buck residence - the writer lived here while teaching at the University of Nanking - is on the provincial heritage register at 22 Hankou Road. Access is the catch. The university does run public open days and publishes how to book them, but the whole booking path is a Chinese WeChat official account and a real-name form, and nothing the university publishes says whether a foreign passport works in it. Treat this as a place to try, not a place to count on.

Not a sight - an answer to the question of what to do if you buy something expensive in Nanjing. Xinjiekou is the city's commercial centre, a roundabout with a Sun Yat-sen statue at its middle and department stores on every corner, and it is where the registered VAT-refund shops cluster. The national rules, from the tax administration's 2025 revision: a foreign visitor who has not stayed on the mainland more than 183 consecutive days can reclaim VAT on goods bought in one registered shop on one day totalling 200 yuan or more, unused, carried out within 90 days of purchase. Nanjing's own numbers, from the municipal tax bureau: 31 registered refund shops in April 2025, 168 by the end of April 2026, with the Xinjiekou malls covered first. Deji Plaza is the one everyone cites for instant refunds, where you are paid in the shop instead of at the border. The customs check happens at Lukou airport, and since 1 July 2026 refund claims under 10,000 yuan are only spot-checked rather than opened one by one.

A grid of quiet plane-tree streets north-west of the city centre, laid out in the 1930s as the 'First New Residential Area' of the Nationalist government's capital plan and built for its ministers, generals and foreign envoys. It is one of the thirty street blocks the Ministry of Housing and the State Administration of Cultural Heritage jointly named China's first batch of national historic districts in April 2015, and Gulou District calls it the largest preserved cluster of Republican-era housing in Nanjing: thirteen sub-blocks, 285 courtyards. The important thing to understand before you come is that walking the streets is the visit. Gulou District's own written answer to a 2024 municipal advisory-body proposal says 109 courtyards are planned to open and 33 had opened by then - so most walls you pass still have offices, homes or private clubs behind them. What is open and worth the detour: sub-block 11 by Ninghai Road (seven listed and heritage-fabric buildings turned into galleries, a bridal store and cafes, open since the end of 2021), the adjoining sub-block 12 that won a UNESCO Asia-Pacific heritage award in 2014, and the Yihe Road Digital Exhibition Hall at 20 Jiangsu Road, the 1930s sewage works built to serve this housing scheme, rebuilt as the district's visitor centre.

The spine of Republican Nanjing, and the reason three of this city's main roads are all called Zhongshan. According to the municipal records office, quoting the official gazetteer of Nanjing place names, the Nationalist government built a road in 1928 specifically to carry Sun Yat-sen's coffin from the Yangtze wharf to his mausoleum on Purple Mountain; its first name was the Funeral Procession Avenue, and in 1929 it was renamed Zhongshan Avenue after him. In 1930 it was divided at two points - the Drum Tower and Xinjiekou - into Zhongshan North Road (5,600 m from Zhongshan Wharf to Gulou Square), Zhongshan Road (1,739.2 m, Gulou to Xinjiekou) and Zhongshan East Road (4,061 m, Xinjiekou to Zhongshan Gate), each 40 m wide. You do not visit it; you notice that you are on it.