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.”
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