A Day Circumnavigating the Nanjing City Walls

It’s one of the few remains of old Nanjing — but it’s a big one

In Nanjing I waited for the Goldilocks time, not too cold, not too hot — to walk the entire Nanjing City Walls. The winter had been miserable. Snow, ice, rain, puddles. With no heating in my office, I sat and shivered with my feet on a hot water bottle. In the lab, beakers full of liquid would freeze solid overnight. It was a penetrating wet cold, and not the time for a long walk around the city. On the other hand, the Nanjing summer is putridly hot. After a few months of cabin-fever, I made my break one Saturday morning, at the end of February, and couldn’t have timed the temperature better.

Nanjing’s walls, at least the main, inner walls, were built between 1366 and 1386, on the orders of Zhu Yuanzhang, the first Ming Emperor. It is said that 200,000, or even a million, were in the workforce. I found a surprising number of locals have no idea that their wall can be walked. For sure, it’s not all there, some sections are missing — and for these you just have to walk along where it once stood — but most of it remains. I guess few people make the whole trip, but it was something that appealed to me (I’ve also walked right around the Constantinople/Istanbul city walls).