Nanjing City Wall Museum

The Nanjing City Wall Museum is located at No. 1 Bianying, Laomendong, Qinhuai District, Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, right next to the Zhonghua Gate barbican. It is a first-class national museum with a total floor area of 12,000 square meters. As a museum dedicated to the history and culture of ancient Chinese city walls, and as an exhibition venue supporting the application for World Cultural Heritage status, it is the largest specialized city wall museum in China.

The museum resembles a semi-transparent urban park nestled at the foot of the ancient city wall. Its most striking architectural feature is its translucent curtain wall made of triple-layer insulated wired glass. The exterior uses a three-layer reflective glass design with an embedded metal layer and a high-performance solar heat-protection film, which effectively reduces solar radiation and helps save energy. Inside the museum, the ground floor is the public service area, with exhibition halls, a reception lobby, a café, and a dedicated academic salon space. The second floor houses offices for the academic salon and a lecture hall. Basement Level 1 contains the temporary exhibition hall, which is connected to the above-ground galleries by escalator. Basement Level 2 is the collections and support area, including artifact storage rooms, an underground parking garage, conservation workspaces, and equipment rooms. The permanent exhibition, themed “Peerless City Walls,” displays more than 2,000 fine cultural artifacts.

The description above comes from the official introduction. When I visited today, the “Peerless City Walls” exhibition was on B1, and it had been newly updated and upgraded, incorporating extensive multimedia and VR technology. The viewing experience was excellent. I went with my grandmother, who grew up living near the city wall by Yijiang Gate. As a child, she was around city-wall bricks every day, so the exhibition brought back many memories of her childhood. It was also the first time I had seriously listed the names of the thirteen gates of the Nanjing City Wall that I had heard since childhood: Jubao Gate (Zhonghua Gate), Guanghua Gate, Tongji Gate, Sanshan Gate (Shuixi Gate), Shicheng Gate (Hanxi Gate), Qingliang Gate, Dinghuai Gate, Yifeng Gate, Zhongfu Gate, Jinchuan Gate, Shence Gate (Heping Gate), Taiping Gate, and Chaoyang Gate (Zhongshan Gate). There were also gates opened during the Qing dynasty and the Republican period: Yijiang Gate, Xinmin Gate, Zhongyang Gate, Fengrun Gate (Xuanwu Gate), Hanzhong Gate, Caochang Gate, and Wuding Gate. Together, these gates form what is still the best-preserved ancient city wall in the world.

In the Ming dynasty, both the firing of the wall bricks and the construction of the wall were carried out entirely by human labor, yet there was already a highly complete supply chain and a sophisticated system for tracing the place of origin and the people responsible. Nearly every brick was inscribed with the titles and names of relevant personnel, from officials at the prefectural, sub-prefectural, and county levels down to brick-making supervisors and kiln workers. All nine levels of personnel were accounted for. From the very beginning, more than 200 million bricks were used to build the wall, so the bricks came from five provinces: Jiangsu, Anhui, Jiangxi, Hunan, and Hubei. These regions were chosen because they all had convenient water routes to Nanjing. Troops stationed around Nanjing at the time also took part in making the bricks. Seeing ancient bricks from so many different places neatly displayed on the wall is truly astonishing.

Besides the history of the bricks, what impressed me deeply was the design and planning of the Ming Imperial Palace in Nanjing, which later served as the model for the Forbidden City in Beijing. At that time, the Chinese divided the heavens into the Three Enclosures, the Four Symbols, and the Twenty-Eight Mansions. The Three Enclosures were the Purple Forbidden Enclosure, the Supreme Palace Enclosure, and the Heavenly Market Enclosure. The Four Symbols in traditional Chinese culture are the Azure Dragon, White Tiger, Vermilion Bird, and Black Tortoise, representing east, west, south, and north, respectively. These four celestial divisions are distributed around the ecliptic and celestial equator, encircling the heavens; each is further divided into seven sections called “mansions,” making a total of twenty-eight. The planning of the Ming Palace in Nanjing also mapped this ancient understanding of the cosmos onto architecture, a concept known as “modeling heaven and earth.” （象天法地） The construction and layout of the palace corresponded to the constellations in the sky, while the imperial city’s moat, the Jinshui River, corresponded to the Milky Way. This also reflected Zhu Yuanzhang’s idea of “following the Mandate of Heaven and establishing the capital at Nanjing.” （应天之命，建都南京）

Another exhibition currently on view in the B1 and ground-floor galleries is “Yuan Blue-and-White Porcelain: New Archaeological Discoveries from the Handcrafted Porcelain Industry Remains of Jingdezhen.” Although the number of exhibits is not especially large, they are all blue-and-white porcelains originally produced in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi, along with a small number of celadon, blue-glazed, green-glazed, and polychrome wares. Unfortunately, after the “baptism” of time, many of the pieces are already damaged or incomplete, so one can only try to glimpse, through the fragments, the elegance, warmth, freshness, and simplicity of ancient ceramics.

Admission to the Nanjing City Wall Museum is free, and a visit takes about two hours. I sincerely recommend it to anyone interested in history, ancient architecture, palaces, and city walls.