Nanjing

Nanjing has been capital ten times over — the "Southern Capital", seat of six early dynasties, of the founding Ming, and of the Republic — and it wears the rank in stone: the Ming city wall, the longest ever built around a city, still runs its brick circuit over hills and lakes, and the first Ming emperor lies beneath Purple Mountain along a spirit way of stone elephants and camels. Higher on the same mountain, the blue-roofed mausoleum of Sun Yat-sen climbs its ceremonial stairs — the Republic's founding father, honoured by every Chinese government since. The city also keeps, with grave dignity, the memorial to the massacre of 1937, one of the twentieth century's necessary places of remembrance.

Life, characteristically, resumes at the Confucius Temple quarter, where the lantern-lit Qinhuai river carries pleasure boats past teahouses as it did when the imperial examinations filled the district with nervous scholars; Nanjing's plum blossom festival each spring is the country's most famous. A university city of great weight, it reads, publishes and debates in proportion.

Its concert life runs through the Poly Grand Theatre — the venue documented in the concert record — Nanjing's link in the national Poly network of stages, where touring orchestras, opera and dance meet local seasons. Walls, scholars, blossom and remembrance: Nanjing is China's memory made civic, and it entertains accordingly — seriously, and by the river.