Nanjing

Settlement on the site goes back to the Warring States period, but Nanjing's history as a capital begins in 229, when the Eastern Wu kingdom established its court here at Jianye. For three centuries afterwards, as northern China fell to invaders, a succession of southern dynasties ruled from the city under the name Jiankang, and it grew into one of the largest cities in the world, a centre of Buddhism, poetry and painting. The Southern Tang made it a capital again in the 10th century.

Its greatest transformation came in 1368, when Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming, made Nanjing the capital of a reunified empire. He built the city wall — an irregular circuit following the hills and water rather than a grid, and among the longest ever constructed — a palace, and his own tomb on Purple Mountain. The court moved to Beijing in 1421, but Nanjing kept a secondary administration and its status as the cultural capital of the south.

Modern history fell heavily on the city. The Treaty of Nanking ended the First Opium War here in 1842; the Taiping rebels made it their capital from 1853 until its recapture in 1864, with vast loss of life; and in 1927 it became the capital of the Nationalist republic, gaining ministries, boulevards and the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. Japanese forces took the city in December 1937 and massacred civilians and disarmed soldiers over the following weeks. After 1949 the capital moved to Beijing, and Nanjing settled into its present role as the provincial capital of Jiangsu, a university and industrial city of the Yangtze.

Nanjing thinks of itself as a city of books and trees, on the strength of a long literary record — the poetry of the Six Dynasties, the Ming and Qing novels written or set here, the examination halls that drew scholars from across the south, and one of China's oldest publishing traditions. Nanjing University and Southeast University keep the student population large, and secondhand bookshops and reading cafés are part of the city's self-image.

The tree-lined boulevards laid out in the Republican decades are treated almost as monuments, and the pruning or removal of their planes causes public argument. Blossom seasons are civic events: plum on Purple Mountain in February, cherry by Jiming Temple in March, and an osmanthus festival at Linggu Temple in autumn. The city's crafts include Yunjin brocade, a gold-threaded silk woven on drawlooms for imperial robes and recognised by UNESCO, and the polished Yuhua pebbles collected south of the walls.

Memory shapes public life in a way it does not elsewhere. The events of 1937 are commemorated annually on 13 December, a national memorial day since 2014, when air-raid sirens sound across the city, and the memorial hall is visited by school groups and officials as a matter of course. Everyday manners are those of the lower Yangtze — direct but polite, food-centred, with long evenings out — and the local dialect, Jianghuai Mandarin, is heard readily in markets and taxis.

About 9.4 million people lived in 2021 in the municipality, eleven districts spreading over both banks of the Yangtze and includes farmland and hills as well as dense urban districts. Students are a large presence: the city has dozens of universities and colleges, and their campuses shape whole neighbourhoods in the north and south-west.

The economy combines heavy industry and services. Petrochemicals, steel, vehicles and electronics occupy the river districts, while software, telecommunications and pharmaceutical firms cluster in the newer zones, and the provincial government, hospitals and universities employ a great many people. The port on the Yangtze handles ocean-going ships despite being far inland, and high-speed rail has made commuting to Shanghai a daily reality for some residents.

Life runs on the metro and the delivery scooter. Mornings start with duck blood soup or a sesame cake from a street shop; evenings fill the lake paths, the wall walks and the barbecue streets, and weekends take families up Purple Mountain. Summer heat pushes activity into the night, and the whole city moves outdoors during blossom season. Housing costs, school competition and the traffic squeezed through the old gates are the familiar complaints.

Nanjing's cooking is Huaiyang in character — mild, savoury and precise — with duck at the centre of it. Yanshuiya, the salted water duck, is dry-cured, salted and then roasted and boiled so that the meat stays pale and tender, and is sold by the half bird from specialist shops; roast duck in a sweet sauce is common alongside it. Yaxue fensi tang, a broth of duck blood curd, gizzard and liver with sweet potato vermicelli, is the city's comfort food, eaten from breakfast until late at night.

The Qinhuai quarter preserves a whole tradition of small dishes: savoury bean curd in spiced broth, beef soup dumplings, thin sesame pancakes, pan-fried buns, dried bean curd knots, and sticky rice dumplings sweetened with osmanthus. Beef guotie, fried until the bases are crisp, and pidu noodles topped with kidney and eel are ordinary lunches, and steamed crab and river fish appear in autumn.

The region's other staples reach the table too — Zhenjiang black vinegar from up the river, Yangzhou-style fried rice, hairy crabs from the lakes, and the sweet pastries of the delta. Yuhua tea, a green tea named after the Yuhuatai terrace south of the old walls, is the local leaf, and osmanthus flavours wine, cakes and syrups through the autumn. Jiangsu rice wine and a growing number of craft beer bars around the universities round out the drinking.