Some facts about Nanjing

I’ve been in Nanjing for nearly three full months now and have explored a good part of the city on my bike, but I haven’t visited any cultural sites during that time. In a trip to Nanjing last fall I hiked around Purple Mountain (it’s more like a big hill) and visited Sun Yatsen’s tomb (a massive set of stairs leading up to his mausoleum), an old temple that is now several touristy pedestrian streets, and the Nanjing Massacre Memorial and Museum.

Since I’m expecting visitors next week, I took out my copy of Lonely Planet China and went online to look up the points of interest in Nanjing and learned a few things about Nanjing. It has the longest city wall in the world and is believed to have been the largest city in the world in the late 14th and early 15th centuries, when the population was nearly half a million people. It was the capital of China under several dynasties and for a time served as the capital of the People’s Republic of China in the early 20th century. Now I know why there’s an area just north of my university that reminds me of the embassy district in Beijing, minus the guards on every corner; it used to be the place where many embassies were located.

Today Nanjing has 7.5 million people, which ranks 7th among Chinese cities. The city has the 10th tallest building in the world (free standing structures, which includes some TV towers); the nearly finished Zifeng tower is 450 meters tall and is only a few blocks away from my apartment.

Speaking of tall buildings, the Sears Tower (#4 on the same list) has new owners and hence a new name – it’s now called the Willis Tower. One Sunday last month a 50 story office tower in Nanjing caught on fire. I could see it from my English school on the 25th floor of another office building a couple kilometers away. It was a surreal sight to see flames leaping from a tall building.