Zhan Garden and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom History Museum

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.