Travel Experience To QinHuai Scenic Area and Nanjing City Wall

On the 6th day of our packaged travel to South Yangtze China, we were still in Nanjing, the 4th city we travelled after Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou. We had a bad sleep last night in this hotel in Nanjing (never bother to remember the name also! 🙁 ). Frankly speaking, besides of this Nanjing’s hotel, all other hotels that we stayed on our whole trip were very good in terms of cleanlinese, comfort, design and also choices of breakfast. I have to admit this is one of the few advantages of packaged tour where, if you book with established and recognised travel agency, you could always rest assure of good accomodation as promised. Or if you travel by yourself and book budget hotel online, you will need those trusty booking agent online.

Eventhough we had to wake up early morning at 7am, and with the bad sleep, I still felt quite energetic. Thanks to the extremely good weather and those reasonably good varieties of local styled chinese breakfast. Though we had the same type of varieties (almost) over the last 5 mornings, I still like it.

This morning on the 6th day, the last travel destination we visited in Nanjing was the ancient Ming Dynasty City Wall of DongShuiGuan (东水关), the left-over historical remains or vestige besides the QinHuai river and across the FuZiMiao pedestrian district we visited the night before.

Nanjing City Wall or Dong Shui Guan has been named as the National Heritage Site by China in 1988. “Excuse me, do you mind taking a photo for 5  of us?”

This city wall remains is one of the best kept heritage in the world. With original length of 30km, it is also claimed as the longest city wall in the world and 60% of it are still standing!

Though part of the outer wall has collapsed over time, it still stand really tall from ground level…. so called city wall to protect the city.

We visited only part of the stretched remains in QinHuai Scenic Area across the river. Until the 6th day, I had to be gratitude on how lucky we were during the trip. It had not been raining since day 1 until the last day of our trip to China! And what’s more, we had the brightest and clearest day on the 6th day.

Air temperature raised back to 10°C on that day (we visited Nanjing in early winter) with bright sun and blue sky.

Perfect photo shoot out weather!!! My Lumix FZ28 had to work really hard on that day!

This scenic area features, besides the city wall, a recreational garden where elderies or retirees relax and make friends.

Babies and grandchildren could also be seen everywhere at the park.

Posing in front of the 600-year-old city wall was just another pleasure… 🙂

Let’s talk about the construction of Nanjing City Wall. The construction of the wall spent 20 years to complete in 14th Centuries, spearheaded by ZhuYuanZhang of Ming Dynasty. The whole wall is sitting on granite and limestone foundation. The vertical brickwall was constructed with carefully picked sources of factories from various part of ancient China.

Because of that, you could see all bricks were stamped with the name of factories. It was believed that by doing so, any brick failure could be traced back to the factory and the mason would be chopped head!

On top of the wall, we could oversee the river of QinHuai, once popularly known as “red light district” of China. FuZiMiao pedestrian district could be seen at far end.

QinHuai River is also famous with its tourist cruise. These chinese design boat we once rode in HangZhou West Lake could also be seen here parking at the quay.

Old folk with her granddaughter, looking at cruise lining up at quay….

Click HERE to view the Lightbox of the above photo set via Flikcr

We spent quite a lot of time shooting photos around the area before we left for our next  hoax of the trip, the jade factory…. You may prefer to subscribe to Travel Feeder’s RSS feed for free update of the stories. Or you may consider to sponsor for my upcoming travel- Travel Feeder.

All above photos were captured by Panasonic Lumix Fz28

About The Author

Cecil Lee

The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.