Nanjing

Sun Yat-sen's tomb, completed in 1929: 392 steps climb to a memorial hall under blue tiles. Entry needs booking ahead under your real name, and the hall is closed on Mondays. Look back from the last step and the Purple Mountain woods spread below.

The tomb of the Hongwu Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming, inscribed as World Heritage in 2003. Along the spirit way stone camels, elephants and horses kneel and stand in pairs. It is most crowded in autumn when ginkgo and maple cover the path.

Opened in 1985 to record the killings that followed the Japanese capture of Nanjing in 1937. There is no charge, but entry needs booking, and Mondays it stays shut. One room shows an excavation with the remains still exposed, so go prepared.

An old pleasure quarter with shops ringing the Confucius Temple and the Qinhuai flowing past its front. After sunset lanterns light the riverside buildings and the boats go out, so buy an evening sailing ticket first.

The south gate of the early Ming wall, with three enclosed courtyards one behind another so attackers who broke in were trapped inside. Every brick is stamped with where it was fired and the overseer's name, so a bad one could be traced to the man responsible.

A lake pressed right against the Ming wall, which you can climb onto and walk along looking down at the water. The Ming kept the population registers on its islands and barred anyone from landing. Now bridges join the islands into a park.

One of China's leading museums, with jade, celadon and goldsmiths' work through the eras. Admission costs nothing but takes bookings, and Monday is its day off. The Republic hall rebuilds a 1930s Nanjing street indoors, with a post office and shops to enter.

The Qing viceroy's office for Liangjiang, then the Taiping Heavenly King's palace, then the Republic's presidential office. A Qing garden and Western-style Republican offices share one compound, and Sun Yat-sen's and Chiang Kai-shek's offices are kept intact.

A yellow-walled temple perched on the rise between the city wall and Xuanwu Lake. In late March the cherries lining Jimingsi Road below it bloom all at once and turn the street pink, and that weekend the crowd makes walking hard.

A double-deck bridge opened in 1968, road above and railway below, counted as the first Yangtze crossing China designed and built by itself. A lift inside the bridgehead tower takes you up to look over river and bridge together.

A vast domed hall set in an old mountainside quarry to enshrine a relic of the Buddha's skull found at the old Bao'en Temple site in 2008; it opened in 2015. Its sunken main hall is lavish, and the trip out to the southern suburbs uses up half a day.

Old lanes inside the wall east of Zhonghua Gate, rebuilt in white walls and dark tiles and lined with Nanjing snack shops. Steps at the far end climb onto the Ming wall, so the usual round is a walk along the ramparts, then down for dinner.

A temple below Qixia Mountain in the northeastern suburbs, where small Buddhas of the Thousand Buddha Cliff, first carved in the Southern Dynasties, crowd the rock face. In autumn the whole hill turns red, and on November weekends the road in jams.

Over 200 garden villas, once home to Nationalist officials and foreign legations in the 1930s, survive along plane-tree avenues. Most are still private homes and closed to visitors, though a handful open as cafes and galleries.

A temple in the woods on the east of Purple Mountain, with the Ming Beamless Hall, built of brick alone and not one wooden beam. In the 1930s it became a memorial to fallen Nationalist soldiers, and the 9-storey pagoda behind looks over the forest.

The Ming and Qing exam ground, where candidates were shut for days in cramped cells that once numbered over 20,000. Now the Imperial Examination Museum with sunken galleries, it adjoins the Confucius Temple, a stop before an evening walk on the Qinhuai.

China's first modern observatory, founded in 1934 on one of Purple Mountain's peaks. Bronze instruments of Ming make, an armillary sphere and an abridged armilla, sit out in the open yard, and the road is steep enough that the cable car or shuttle is easier.