City Walk · Nanjing, Jiangsu｜Old Residential Streets at Dusk

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Jiangsu feels like a table laden with substantial, confident dishes, where each of its “thirteen cities” holds its own. Suzhou serves gardens alongside ledgers; Wuxi steadies itself with Taihu Lake and manufacturing; Changzhou has even turned dinosaurs into a cultural IP; Yangzhou can persuade anyone back into gentleness with a single morning tea. And yet Nanjing, the provincial capital, is often teased as having “the least presence.” It resembles the most sensible eldest child in a family—never competing for attention, never seeking sympathy, quietly memorizing the family genealogy. It doesn’t excel at slogans. Instead, it lets others take the spotlight while shouldering the substance itself. You might mistake it for calm, but in truth it compresses time densely—growing brighter the longer you walk through it, and remarkably worth rereading.

This time, I deliberately avoided the Presidential Palace, the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, and the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum—the grand narratives printed on the covers of guidebooks. Nanjing’s story has never belonged solely to tourist sites. It is an ancient capital of six dynasties, its former splendor receding like a tide, leaving behind intricate patterns in the sand. It is also a city scarred by modern history, where the shadows of certain years still lie dormant between the stones of its city walls. Walking in Nanjing teaches a courteous restraint: not treating history as background music, nor turning suffering into conversation material. Its weight is never designed to please. It is more like the Yangtze River in winter—appearing still, yet moving forward every second, still breathing.

So I entrusted my evening walk to a quieter part of the city, around the residential enclave near Yihe Road—Heshou Road and Putuo Road.

As dusk descended like a piece of deep blue velvet, Nanjing folded away its daytime “textbook seriousness” and shifted into a nearly whispered, intimate narration. Traces of snow had yet to melt, clinging lightly to blue-grey rooftops and dark tiles. The cold white intertwined with brick and stone, revealing the street with the texture of an old photographic negative.

Streetlight glow was sliced by the bare branches of plane trees, scattering across weathered walls. As I walked on, courtyards hidden behind hedges revealed an aesthetic of restraint. The marble plaque at Putuo Road No. 1, engraved with the words “Immovable Cultural Relic,” guarded a silence nearly a century deep. These buildings have bones: sloped roofs, red-brick chimneys standing defiantly against the grey