This week’s travel dream: Deciphering China in Nanjing

last updated 8 January 2015

Nanjing “radiates a somber grandness” far different from the moods you’ll find in the other major cities of China, said David Kelly in the Los Angeles Times. Settled 2,500 years ago, this former imperial capital has been “razed and rebuilt and razed again” as it has played out its central role in “the great pageant” of the nation’s history. Not knowing China well the first time I visited, I booked a trip to Nanjing hoping that the city would offer me a foothold on an intimidatingly vast and ancient culture.

As I stepped off an impressively futuristic bullet train from Shanghai, my first glimpse of Nanjing “was a sharp, exhilarating slap in the face.” Mountains coiled like dragons around its skyscraper core, canals and tributaries to the Yangtze River “meandered through cramped neighborhoods,” and “thousands of stately plane trees formed luxurious canopies above chaotic streets.” A day spent at the esteemed Nanjing Museum, a 17-acre complex of halls, gardens, and pavilions, provided me a historical primer. Six times an imperial capital, this city of 8 million has also endured some of China’s worst traumas, including mass slaughter during the 19th-century Taiping Rebellion and an infamous 1937 massacre carried out by Japanese invaders. “But war didn’t define Nanjing”: Evidence of its rich culture greeted me at every turn, from the statues of monks in the nearby bamboo forest to the huge stone elephants I encountered at Purple Mountain, a park crisscrossed with trails where 35,000 plum trees each year “explode with pink and burgundy blooms.”

Back at my hotel that night, a woman played Elvis songs on a piano while I ate a “magical” buffet featuring fungus soup and salted duck. Once full, I hired a cab to bring me to the Temple of Confucius, located in a busy area near the Qinhuai River. After my daylong immersion in Nanjing’s daunting history, “reveling in its vibrant present was a welcome relief.” As I drank tea and watched colorful boats slip by and red lanterns swing in the evening breeze, passing young people gave me hope. “War, tyranny, and suffering ebb and flow, but it is the resilience of a people that defines a nation.”