Nanjing on foot: a day along the Ming wall, from gate to lake

The Ming city wall in Nanjing (南京 Nánjīng) is not a monument you photograph from a bus and forget. Roughly twenty-five kilometres of it still stand, and the wall only makes sense on foot, one stretch at a time, until the city beneath it slowly changes shape.

Start at the gate built to be a trap

Begin at Zhonghua Gate (中华门 Zhōnghuá Mén), the largest surviving fortress gate in the country. It is not a single arch but four, set behind a series of urn-shaped courtyards the Chinese call wengcheng (瓮城) — enclosures meant to swallow an attacking army and close around it. Inside the walls are twenty-seven chambers that once hid soldiers and grain. Stand in the first courtyard before the tour groups arrive and the scale reads as architecture, not photograph.

Walk the rampart, read the bricks

Climb the ramp and the top of the wall opens into a brick road wide enough for carts. Many bricks carry stamped inscriptions — the kiln, the county, the names of the men answerable if the brick failed. They were fired in the 1360s and 1370s, and you are walking on a quality-control system six centuries old. Below on one side runs the Qinhuai River (秦淮河 Qínhuái Hé); on the other, laundry lines and plane trees of a working neighbourhood.

End where the wall meets the lake

Follow the rampart north, through gaps where the city grew over it and back onto the long Taicheng (台城) stretch. It finishes at Jiming Temple (鸡鸣寺 Jīmíng Sì), its yellow halls stacked against the wall, and at Jiefang Gate (解放门 Jiěfàng Mén), which opens onto Xuanwu Lake (玄武湖 Xuánwǔ Hú). Walk the causeways to the islands as the light goes flat. You have crossed most of a dynasty's eastern defence in an afternoon, and your legs will tell you so.

城墙不是用来拍照的，是用来一步一步走过去的。