Purple Mountain: Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, the Ming Tomb and Nanjing Museum

The Ming layer: the tomb of Zhu Yuanzhang, the peasant who founded the Ming dynasty in 1368 and made Nanjing its capital, and a World Heritage site since 2003. It is a long walk rather than a building. The spirit way starts at the Xiamafang gateway, passes the stele pavilion Nanjing calls the Square City - its tablet, raised in 1413 by the Yongle emperor for his father, carries 2,746 characters; the park calls it the largest old stele in Nanjing - then runs 615 m between pairs of stone animals on the Stone Elephant Road before turning to the gates, the Soul Tower and the burial mound behind it. Almost everything with a roof was burned in the Taiping war; the tower's roof went back on in 2009.

The provincial museum of Jiangsu, founded in 1933 as the preparatory office of the National Central Museum at Cai Yuanpei's proposal, with more than 430,000 objects from the Palaeolithic to today. The main hall is a Liao-style great hall designed in the 1930s under the guidance of Liang Sicheng and Liu Dunzhen. A 2009-2013 expansion added four more halls, so it is now 'one museum, six halls': History, Art, Special Exhibitions, the Republic of China Hall - a reconstructed Republican-era street inside the museum - Digital, and Intangible Heritage. Free for the permanent galleries, but every visitor needs a booking, and foreign passport holders have their own way in.

The Republican layer of Nanjing in one climb. Sun Yat-sen, leader of the 1911 revolution and first provisional president of the Republic of China, was buried here in June 1929, and the tomb was built to be walked up: from the archway at the bottom to the sacrificial hall at the top is 700 m on the level and 70 m of height, 392 granite steps and ten landings, all under blue glazed tiles. Admission is free, but only with a real-name booking for a time slot. The area above the 'Tianxia Weigong' gate closes on Mondays, and the burial chamber behind the hall is shut to the public, so the climb ends at the hall doors.

Two layers in one ticket. The Ming layer is the Beamless Hall: built in the early Ming entirely of brick vaults - no timber at all, which is why it survived the fires that took the rest of the great Linggu Temple - with a central vault 11.4 m wide and 14 m high. The Republican layer is what the 1930s built around it: the hall was turned into the memorial hall of the National Revolutionary Army cemetery in 1933, and a 60 m, nine-storey memorial pagoda went up behind it (1931-33), with a spiral stair of 252 steps inside. The working temple on the site today is only a part of the old one.

Republican Nanjing at home. The name everyone uses honours Soong Mei-ling, Madame Chiang Kai-shek, but the official name is plainer: the former official residence of the Chairman of the National Government. It is a villa on a hill east of the Ming Xiaoling stele pavilion, listed by the Ministry of Construction as outstanding modern architecture in 1991 and a national heritage site since 2001. A separate ¥30 ticket, or part of the four-site combo.

The palace the Forbidden City was copied from, reduced to its foundations. Zhu Yuanzhang's palace was home to three Ming emperors for 54 years before the court moved to Beijing in 1421, and the city's gazetteer office calls it the blueprint for Beijing's palace. What is left is split by Zhongshan East Road into two free parks: to the south, Wuchaomen Park with the Meridian Gate's stone platform, its five arched Inner Golden Water bridges and a garden of giant column bases; to the north, the Ming Palace Ruins Park over the site of the three great halls, where the Palace Museum from Beijing began a joint excavation in 2025.

A 1932-33 open-air stage south-east of the square at the foot of the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, designed by Guan Songsheng and Yang Tingbao: a semicircular bowl of lawn 50 m in radius, cut into twelve wedges, facing a stage with a curved sounding wall and a crescent lily pond in front. It was built as part of the mausoleum's memorial buildings and is still used for forest concerts. The cheapest of the four scenic-area tickets at ¥10, and a two-minute walk from the Bo'ai Archway.

Nanjing's plum-blossom hill, inside the Ming Xiaoling ticket. The park manager counts more than 30,000 trees of over 330 varieties across 1,533 mu of Plum Blossom Hill and the newer Plum Valley, and calls it 'the first plum hill under heaven'. Its season is February to mid-March; the rest of the year it is a wooded hill beside the spirit way. On top is the memorial hall to Sun Quan, the third-century ruler of Wu - the Six Dynasties layer of Nanjing in one small building.

The way up without the climb. The cableway runs from the lower station at Dibaocheng past a middle stop at the old observatory to Toutuo Ridge, 448 m, which the park calls the mountain's second-highest peak and the best platform for looking over the whole of Nanjing - it has three viewing terraces. One way ¥60, return ¥100.

The observatory the park calls 'the cradle of modern Chinese astronomy', on the mountain's third peak at about 267 m. Built in 1934, it is the first modern astronomical research institution China established on its own, and the old site is now a museum run by the scenic-area manager: five Ming and Qing instruments, the 600 mm reflector the manager says was once Asia's largest, Zhang Yuzhe's office, and the Tianbao Castle platform over the city. It is shut: closed since 2026-09-01 for conservation works scheduled to run to the end of 2027, with no reopening date announced. The cableway past it still runs.

How you get between sights that are one to two kilometres apart in a forest. Since 1 October 2025 the park runs a network built on four metro stations on Line 2 - Muxuyuan, Xiamafang, Xiaolingwei and Zhonglingjie - and two visitor centres, with shuttle lines out to Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, Meiling Palace, Ming Xiaoling's gates, Linggu and the Music Stage. ¥10 a ride or ¥30 for the day. Every line and stop is searchable in Amap (Gaode).