The Old South City: Confucius Temple, the Qinhuai River and Zhonghua Gate

Nanjing's place to understand the imperial examinations, the 1,300-year system that chose officials by written test. Above ground is what survives of the Jiangnan exam compound — the Mingyuan Tower, the Zhigong Hall, and a row of the tiny cells in which candidates sat, shut in, for the length of the exam. Below ground the museum goes down four floors: five sections, 33 galleries, more than 10,000 objects, and it became a national first-grade museum in 2020 (Qinhuai district government). ¥50, open every day until 22:00 according to the museum's own page — the rare Nanjing museum you can do after dinner.

The Nanjing of Tang poetry is a river at night: Du Mu's 'mist over cold water, moonlight on sand, moored at night on the Qinhuai near the wine shops'. The painted boats leave from the Panchi pier right in front of the Confucius Temple and loop the inner Qinhuai — the 'ten li of Qinhuai', about 5 km of river inside the city wall — past the Examination Hall, old riverside houses and the lit bridges. There are two routes: the everyday east loop, and an evening-only west route with staged scenes along the banks. Go after dark; by day it is a slow 40 minutes past walls you could have walked past.

The south gate of Ming Nanjing, and the place to see what a Ming city wall was actually for. Built between 1366 and 1386 and called Jubao Gate until 1931, it is not a single gate but a fortress of nested courtyards — the Qinhuai district page counts 27 vaulted 'soldier caves' in the barbican, enough, it says, to hide more than 3,000 men. The wall office calls it the most complex of the 13 Ming capital gates. Your ticket also lets you walk the south stretch of the wall, about 6 km from Dongshuiguan to Jiqing Gate. This is the Ming layer; the City Wall Museum is next door, free.

The one Nanjing monument many Europeans once knew by name: the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing, the nine-storey glazed pagoda of the Ming Bao'en Temple, which Western writers counted among the wonders of the medieval world and which was destroyed in the Taiping war in the mid-19th century. What stands here now is not that tower. Excavations in the late 2000s found the temple's foundations and a Song-dynasty crypt beneath the pagoda site; heritage rules then ruled out a copy, so in 2015 the city put up a 93-metre steel-and-glass tower over the crypt as a protective shelter, the same shape and proportions as the old one but built of modern materials. The ruins, the crypt and the objects found in it — stone and iron caskets, a jewelled Ashoka stupa — are the real thing. ¥90. This is the Ming layer, under a 21st-century roof.

'Fuzimiao' means two things, and the difference costs money. It is the whole old-south-city precinct on the Qinhuai River — streets, bridges, shops, the Jiangnan Examination Hall — which you walk into for free; and it is the Confucius Temple itself, whose main hall, the Dacheng Hall, is ¥30. The temple was founded in 1034, rebuilt in 1869, burned by the Japanese army in 1937 and rebuilt again from 1984, so what you see is a late-20th-century reconstruction on the old plan (Qinhuai district government). This is the Ming-and-Qing layer of Nanjing, and the city's busiest tourist street. One rule to plan around: on Chinese public holidays and from 20 July to 20 August, the core of the precinct is booking-only between 14:00 and 22:00.

The real old house of the old south city. The Gan family compound was begun in the Jiaqing reign (1796-1820) and was the home of the Qing scholar Gan Xi; locals call it the 'ninety-nine and a half rooms'. Nearly 10,000 square metres of courtyards run one behind another, hall opening onto hall, and the city museum service calls it one of the larger and better-preserved Qing residential compounds in any big Chinese city. It is now the Nanjing Folk Custom Museum and the city's intangible-heritage museum, so between the courtyards you get Qinhuai lanterns, knotwork and cloth crafts, and Baiju, Nanjing's folk ballad singing. ¥20. This is the Qing layer, and the house is the protected original, not a streetscape rebuild like Laomendong.

'East of the Old Gate': the grid of lanes between Zhonghua Gate and the Qinhuai, rebuilt from 2010 as the model of how Nanjing would conserve its old south city. The lane pattern is old — Sanjiaoying, Zhongying, Bianying, Shangjiang Kaopeng — and so are a handful of Qing houses, the largest being the Jiang Shoushan ('Millionaire Jiang') mansion; much of the rest is new building in grey brick, fitted in between them and let to cafés, snack shops, craft studios and small museums. Free to walk, and a little calmer than Fuzimiao a kilometre north. Come at dusk and climb the city wall at its southern edge.

The indoor half of the Zhonghua Gate visit, at the foot of the wall just east of the gate. It opened on a trial basis on 28 December 2021 and is the city wall office's own museum: the Ming wall and its bricks — the office's collection is sorted by the provinces that fired them (Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu) and by type, from calligraphy bricks to bricks stamped for the Ministry of Works. Free, closed Mondays; do it before you climb the gate, so you know what you are looking at.

A short lane south of the Wende Bridge that Chinese readers know from one poem. In the Six Dynasties the Wang and Xie clans, the two great aristocratic families of the Eastern Jin, lived here; by the Tang dynasty their houses were gone, and Liu Yuxi wrote: 'The swallows that nested in the halls of the Wangs and Xies / now fly into ordinary people's homes.' The Qinhuai district rebuilt the lane in 1997 and put up the Wang Dao and Xie An Memorial, a small ¥8 museum of Six Dynasties objects and the two families. This is the Six Dynasties layer, but only as memory: the lane and hall you see date from 1997.

A low hill about 1 km south of Zhonghua Gate. Its name, 'Rain of Flowers Terrace', comes from a Southern Dynasties story told on the site's own English page: the monk Yunguang preached here so well that flowers rained from the sky and turned into the coloured pebbles found on the hill, the Yuhua stones. Today the hill is the Yuhuatai Martyrs' Cemetery, the memorial to the Communist revolutionaries who died here, laid out along one axis: a 1979 granite sculpture group, a 42.3-metre monument from 1989, a reflecting pool, and the Yuhuatai Martyrs Memorial Hall, opened in 1988, a national first-grade museum. The park is free and needs no booking; the hall is closed on Mondays.

A classical rock-and-water garden with an unusual museum inside it. The garden began as the west garden of the Ming prince Xu Da's mansion, became the provincial treasurer's office under the Qing, and got its name from the Qianlong emperor, who stayed here on his second southern tour; the city museum administration calls it the oldest surviving garden in Nanjing and one of the four great gardens of Jiangnan. In the 1850s Nanjing was the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the vast mid-19th-century rebellion, and the museum in the garden is, in the administration's words, the only state museum devoted to it. ¥30 by day; on evenings with the garden play it is ¥70-100.