Day Trips: Niushou Mountain, Qixia Mountain and Tangshan

A quarry and cement-works valley at Tangshan turned into a landscaped park, and since 29 June 2024 free to walk into: the Jiangning district culture and tourism bureau announced on 26 June 2024 that from the 29th the gate ticket was scrapped and the public landscape areas opened free, while the attractions inside - the Suyun Thirteen Gardens, the Baobao children's park, the Nashi nature-exploration park, the little train, the shuttles and the cable car - would each charge. The operator describes it as a natural scenic area made out of cliff faces and mine pits, which is the reason to come: the old silos and quarry walls are still there, reworked around a mirror-pool square and an underwater plant house. Budget a half-day, more if you pay for the gardens. It sits next to the Yangshan stele quarry, which has its own path gate into the park.

A limestone cave in Leigong Hill at Tangshan where quarrymen broke through in March 1990, and where in March 1993 a labourer digging there turned up a human skull. The municipal museum authority's record: the Hulu (Gourd) Cave is a single hall-like chamber about 64 m long and 25 m wide on average, with a small side chamber below the south side of its middle section, where the skulls were found. The excavation ran 38 working days from 10 December 1993 to 16 January 1994, led by Lu Zun'e for the Nanjing Museum and Peking University, and produced two skulls and one tooth of Homo erectus from about 350,000 years ago plus 1,325 animal fossil specimens. Skull I was a woman of about 30, skull II a man of about 35. It was made a national key protected site in 2006. Nothing else in this district comes close to its age.

Nanjing's airport, in Lukou, Jiangning District, about 35 km south of the old city - and the reason this entry exists is immigration, not architecture. Lukou is one of the 65 ports where nationals of 55 countries can enter China visa-free in transit and stay up to 240 hours. The permitted area for a Jiangsu port is Jiangsu province. The same national notice adds that transit-visa-free travellers may move across provincial lines within the permitted areas of 24 provinces during those 240 hours - which is why entering at Shanghai and taking a train to Nanjing is legitimate. Separately, since 5 November 2025 Lukou is one of ten airports where a passenger holding a through international ticket, transferring within 24 hours without leaving the airport, needs no exit-entry border inspection at all. The city transport bureau describes the airport as a 4F airfield with two parallel runways, two passenger-and-cargo terminals and a transport centre, operating since 1 July 1997 with its second phase opened on 12 July 2014.

The high-speed station most foreign visitors actually arrive at, and, with the airport, one of the two places you are most likely to land in Nanjing. The city transport bureau gives the address as 98 Yulan Road, Yuhuatai District, and lists what runs through it: the Beijing-Shanghai, Shanghai-Wuhan-Chengdu, Nanjing-Hangzhou, Nanjing-Anhui and Nanjing-Hefei high-speed lines plus the Shanghai-Nanjing intercity railway. If you hold a foreign passport, the thing to do before you travel is the identity check: since 28 November 2023 China Railway lets you verify a foreign passport online on the 12306 site or app - fill in name, nationality and document number for automatic checking, or upload a photo of the passport page for manual checking - and you can still do it at a station window. Verification has to pass before you can buy a ticket and travel. Note the geography, because guides get it wrong: this station is in Yuhuatai District, not Jiangning.

A Buddhist hill about 15 km south of the city centre whose centrepiece is not old at all: the Usnisa Palace, a domed hall sunk into an abandoned iron-mine pit on the mountain's west peak, built to enshrine a relic of the Buddha's skull. The operator's own description is worth keeping in mind - 'built on the basis of a leftover deep iron-ore pit, a deep-pit structure'. Inside, the Great Vault of Zen is an oval space 112 m north to south, 62 m east to west and about 41.2 m high, over 6,000 square metres across three above-ground levels; the relic-hall level is 33 m from ground level and spans underground levels 1 to 3. Entry is 160 yuan, the operator's 2025 notice says it runs on timed online booking, and it is one of the six Nanjing attractions that kept real-name booking when the city dropped the requirement everywhere else in July 2024. Come for a 21st-century religious interior, not for an ancient temple.

A wooded hill 20 km north-east of the city that Qianlong called 'the first fine and elegant mountain of Jinling', and where Nanjing goes for autumn colour: the district government counts 150,000 colour-changing trees, and calls it one of China's four great maple-viewing areas. Historians, it says, sum the place up as 'one Qixia Mountain, half the history of Jinling'. The point for a foreign visitor is that the maples are the least of it. On the hillside just east of Qixia Temple is the Thousand Buddha Cliff, a Southern-dynasties cave-shrine complex on the national heritage register; in front of the temple stands the Tang-dynasty Ming Zhengjun stele; and in the temple's south-east corner is the stone reliquary pagoda, listed as Southern Tang. Tickets are 50 yuan, or 80 during the maple festival - a price set by the district's own price bureau and repeated in the 2026 municipal price handbook.

The working monastery at the south-west foot of Qixia Mountain, and the oldest continuously important thing in this district. The municipal religious-affairs bureau's own account: in 484, the Southern Qi recluse and classicist Ming Sengshao gave up his house here to be a temple, and the monk Fadu founded Qixia Temple on the site of his study; under the Liang, the monk Senglang expounded the Three Treatise doctrine here, which is why the temple is called the ancestral court of the Sanlun school. When the Sui emperor ordered reliquary pagodas built across eighty-three prefectures, his decree named this temple first. Under the Tang it was briefly the Temple of Merit and stood with Lingyan in Shandong, Yuquan in Hubei and Guoqing in Zhejiang as one of the four great monastic establishments; the religious-affairs bureau records that Qianlong stayed here on five of his southern tours. It was named a national key Buddhist temple in April 1983. It is a religious venue, not an exhibit - and its hours are not published anywhere we could find.

A hot-spring district 30 km east of the city, and the most straightforward answer to 'what do people do out here in winter'. The district government's figures: a 29.74 sq km planned area holding 150,000 mu of hills at 80 per cent forest cover, made Nanjing's only national-level tourist resort area in October 2015, with more than twenty star-standard hot-spring hotels and thirty-odd guesthouses in a converted village. There is no single bathhouse to send you to, and that is the point of this entry: the springs here are a resort industry, not a public bath, so what you buy is either a hotel night or a day pass at one of the resorts, and prices sit at resort level. The cultural anchor is a provincial-level protected building - Chiang Kai-shek's spring villa - which the city opens free once a year, on 23 April, Nanjing's liberation anniversary. Note also that the water is metered: a municipal ordinance puts the springs under total-volume control with progressive charging above quota.

Five limestone quarry faces in a row, from about 30 m to 110 m high, turned into a park - and the most interesting recent thing in the outer districts if you like seeing what a city does with its own damage. The provincial environment department's account: six village enterprises open-cast mined limestone here from 1972 to 2002 across roughly 600 mu, the quarries closed in 2004, and in 2017 the Tangshan resort administration began a make-safe-then-treat restoration that deliberately kept the high cut rock walls rather than greening them over. The municipal sports bureau calls it Nanjing's first batch of 'urban double repair' pilot projects, about 40 hectares, open since the end of 2018. Officially it is an open park, and platforms say entry is free. What costs money are the things planted inside it - a children's adventure park, camping, hot-spring facilities, balloon rides - and those keep their own hours.

Three unfinished pieces of a stone tablet, still lying in the quarry where they were cut, and the clearest thing in Nanjing about the scale of Ming imperial ambition. The city records office gives the story: in 1405 the Yongle emperor gathered over ten thousand craftsmen at Yangshan, west of Tangshan, to cut the memorial stele for his father Zhu Yuanzhang's tomb; after several dozen months of work the base, the crown and the shaft had taken rough shape, and were abandoned because they could not be moved. Its figures: the base about 17 m high, 29.5 m wide, 12 m thick, about 16,250 tonnes; the crown about 10 m by 22 m by 10.3 m, about 6,118 tonnes; the shaft about 51 m by 14.2 m by 5 m, about 8,799 tonnes. Stood up, the tablet would have been about 78 m tall - a thirty-storey building - and weighed about 31,167 tonnes. It was made a national heritage site in 2013. The ticket is 40 yuan, the city's regulated maximum, and the site also packages the quarry with a mock-Ming theme village.