Nanjing from above: a half-day walk along the Ming city wall

Most old city walls in China are things you look at from below, from a car window or a plaza with a bronze plaque. Nanjing's Ming wall is different: much of it is a surface, broad enough to walk two abreast, and long enough that half a day takes only a bite out of it. The stretch above Xuanwu Lake is the bite worth taking.

Start at Jiefang Gate, early

The ramp at Jiefang Gate (解放门, Jiěfàng Mén) sits beside Jiming Temple, a few minutes on foot from the metro station of the same name. Arrive when the ticket window opens and the first hour on the parapet belongs mostly to the wall itself, to sweepers working the path below and to the temple bell carrying over the roofs.

Once you are up, the city rearranges itself. On one side Xuanwu Lake (玄武湖, Xuánwǔ Hú) opens out with its causeways and rented boats; on the other, grey rooflines run flat toward Purple Mountain, and the traffic you were standing in ten minutes ago becomes a sound rather than a fact.

Read the bricks as you go

Look down at the paving and the parapet. A great many bricks carry stamped inscriptions naming the county that supplied them, the official who supervised the kiln, and the man who fired the clay — accountability pressed into the material five hundred years before anyone called it quality control. Once you have found the first one, you will find them for the rest of the walk.

A wall that names its makers is a wall built to be inspected.

城砖上刻着窑匠与监造官的名字，责任落到具体的人身上。

Come down at the lake, save the south for afternoon

Descend at Xuanwu Gate (玄武门, Xuánwǔ Mén) and the wall drops you straight into the lake park, where the pace changes to card games, thermoses and slow laps around the water. That is the natural end of the morning, and a decent lunch is a short walk in almost any direction.

If the legs hold, take the metro south in the afternoon to Zhonghua Gate (中华门, Zhōnghuá Mén), where the wall thickens into a fortress of nested courtyards and vaulted chambers built to hide soldiers. Doing the two ends on the same day tells you something a single viewpoint cannot: that this was never decoration, and that the walking is the point.