Nanjing, a city with a prominent position in the history of China, the capital of the coastal Jiangsu province, and capital of the country for 6 dynasties and the brief 'Republic of China', until 1949 when Beijing took over. It first became the capital in 229AD, although it was then called Jiankang, and through various name changes, dynasty overthrows, city razing and rebuilding has been capital for about 400 years in total. The Nationalists still consider it to be the true capital of the 'RoC', Taipei in Taiwan being just a temporary home.

I arrived just before midday and bought a map from one of the hawkers waiting outside the station. It was all in Chinese characters but I thought it would be good to practice my reading so I didn't bother to hunt down an English one. There is only one metro line in Nanjing (by next year Shanghai will have about 15) and it didn't go anywhere I wanted to go. Struggling to find a bus that would take me to the Zhongshan scenic area, a big hill that straddles the east of the city centre, I decided to hail a taxi. A motorbike taxi driver spotted me looking and waved me over. Having never taken one of these before and the weather being quite reasonable, I pointed on the map where I wanted to go and hopped on. Riding on the elevated roads and in between cars, I wished I still had my long hair. It was a fun journey and at every stop we would have disjointed conversations, him practicing his English and me practising my Mandarin. As we chatted and became more friendly I was less and less sure of how tight I was supposed to hold on to his back, although I guess that's my problem not his.

I got to the bottom of Zijinshan (Purple Gold Mountain) and got the cable car up, which is the dodgiest cable car ride I've ever taken. Bits and pieces looked like they were missing, the thin sheet acting as a roof almost came off several times in the slight wind and pretty much every car that passed me looked like it was about to fall off. The uncomfortable feeling was not eased by me not seeing a single other person on the half hour ride up to the peak, and what on Earth, among so much forested hillside, is the constant sound of clanging metal?!

The view from the peak was not all that great because the visibility was too low. It might have been a particularly polluted weekend, although I have heard that Nanjing is in a very foggy geographical location. Either way not much of the city was available for viewing. There are a few tourist attractions to see by foot on the south side of the hill so I headed down. After an hour of walking in incessant buzzing of cicada's, I reached the Linggu Temple. Sick to the back teeth of temples and putting my nose up at the extortionate 35RMB entrance fee I walked on. Although the Linggu Pagoda is probably one of the biggest I've seen, certainly the tallest I've actually climbed up, so I checked out the view from top and carried on.

I got to the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, which I found boring as hell and went through quite quickly. He is considered the 'Father of Modern China' and was a key figure in overthrowing the Qing Dynasty in 1911. He was the first president of China and is one of those rare figures liked by both the Communists and Nationalists alike. Nearby is the Tomb of The first Ming Emperor, Ming Xiaoling, which I was actually looking forward to but failed to find, and so got on a bus headed for downtown. We drove past it immediately.

I got to my hostel on Shanghai Road where I met Batou the Golden Retriever who was playful like my dog Dylan. I was going to go out for the evening and explore some downtown bars but the atmosphere was cool in the hostel so I drank some beers, chatted to people there and watched Family Guy and some bizarre, Chinese-language stand up comedy show with no English subtitles.

I got up early and made my way to the Nanjing Yangzi River Bridge which is a huge double decker bridge with a road and even a bus stop on the top layer and a railroad underneath. I spent an hour walking over the bridge and back again since I enjoy all that riverside, bridge, port, boat stuff.

The Yangzi River, or as it is more commonly misspelled by people who refuse to stop using the old, useless Romanisation of Chinese words, Yangtze, is the longest river in China and third in the world after the Nile and the Amazon, and runs from a glacier in the Tibetan Plateau all the way to Shanghai. Yangzi technically only refers to the lower reaches of the river but early missionaries and traders applied the name to the whole river. The Chinese name for the river is Chang Jiang, which translates as 'Long River', but by many Chinese it is also called the 'Main Street of China'. Roughly 800 million people, about 12% of the world's population live alongside the river. At no time in history anywhere in the world has one river served so many people.

The buses being what they are, and the metro being what it isn't I got a taxi to the Museum of The Nanjing Massacre, more commonly know as 'The Rape of Nanking', and known in Japan as 'That Nanjing Incident'. If you don't know, The Rape of Nanking refers to a six week period during World War II when, in December 1937 the invading Japanese forces captured Nanjing and among other atrocities, went on to kill 300,000 civilians. Although some Japanese right-wing nationalists claim it is only 40,000, while a small minority dispute the massacre at all. Most people in Japan don't deny the event but massacre denialists exacerbate an ongoing tension between the two countries.

The museum itself is really well put together and if it wasn't about something so horribly depressing it would probably be one of the best museums I've been to. It takes quite a stomach or a far removed mind to walk through the broken bones of skeletons actually dug up from the mass grave sites. Especially when you walk along side a small skeleton and the caption next to it tells you that ¡°the head of this six year old child was separated from the body before death¡±. However one thing that really undermines the gravity of what you are seeing is the irritating creepy music they pump through speakers placed all through the museum, sometimes giving it more of a theme park feel than a museum.

I had lunch and, since all of the tourist spots are so far away from each other, I got another taxi to The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Museum. This is yet another bloody chapter in the history of Nanjing and is actually considered the bloodiest civil war in the history of the world.

In 1850, a Christian convert called Hong Xiuquan, who was leader of the Taiping Rebellion, overthrew the Qing Dynasty. He had actually become severely mentally ill and was claiming to be the brother of Jesus Christ. He captured significant parts of southern China calling his country the Heavenly Kingdom, and at it's height governed 30 million people. He also renamed Nanjing as Tianjing, or Heavenly Capital. After only 14 years The Qing army, aided by the British and French had recaptured most of the land and in June 1864 recaptured Nanjing. Hong Xiuquan had died of food poisoning as a result of eating wild vegetables only a few days before Imperial forces took the city. They cremated his body and blasted his ashes out of a canon in order to ensure that his remains have no resting place as eternal punishment for the uprising. Between 20 and 30 million people are estimated to have died during the civil war.

Mao Zedong viewed the Taiping as early heroic revolutionaries, and the rebellion as a legitimate peasant uprising against a corrupt feudal system that anticipated his own. One contributing factor to the uprising was the view that the Qing Dynasty was weak, and the rebellion was exacerbated by the unequal 'Treaty of Nanking' in 1842 which was signed on a docked ship in Nanjing's port. It marked the end of the First Opium War and resulted in Hong Kong being handed over to the British until 1997.

Next stop was Zhonghua Gate or the 'Gate of China'. Zhonghuamen is the southernmost gate of the 600 year old city wall which is the largest city wall in China. There are 13 original Ming gates but over the years and dynasties 5 more popped up. Zhonghuamen actually consists of four gates with three closed courtyards where invaders could be trapped and slaughtered by up to 3,000 soldiers that could hide inside twenty seven hidden caves. The entrance ticket allows you inside all of the courtyards and even on top of the gates. I was disappointed that you can't walk along the top of the wall but a few people were jumping over a fence to do just that, so I followed. I carried on walking well past everyone else and felt like I could almost be walking on the Chester city wall. (That really should be a joke.) After about an hour of walking I got in to trouble with two official looking types and walked back to Zhonghuamen.

Finally the metro proved useful. I got off near Xuanwu lake and with a couple of hours to kill before my train back to Shanghai, I explored. The lake has 5 islets joined together by bridges and each comes with a tourist attraction and flowery name. It was getting darker and colder as the clock neared 18:52, my departure time, and with the lake being right next to the station I hurried through, thoroughly exhausted, and waited for my train home back to Shanghai.