Coming Down Alert – Nanking’s Gulou

While pointing out a few nice strolls around Nanking in recent posts it’s also necessary to note some destruction. While the former John Rabe house – see yesterday’s post – preserved as a museum, it is now effectively an island surrounded by new buildings while most of the similar ‘Republican era’ buildings in the area are just about all gone. This is rather a shame as you can’t really get a sense of how the old city sat with itself, if you know what I mean. This is the Gulou/Zhongshan Road area, one of the axis roads constructed in the 1920s for Sun Yat-sen’s funeral and also one of the thoroughfares that gives Nanking’s layout the same sort of feel as the American capital at times. For sure if Peking is New York and Shanghai Chicago then Nanking is Washington DC. These buildings being torn down are late 1920s/early 1930s. The tower blocks and high rises for Nanking’s new rich have the strangest names – I swear these are not made up but culled from developers boards by the building sites: California City, RomanVision, Chic Hills and Riviera Royale!!