Nanjing football fans watch live football games outside while enjoying the summer breeze. During the World Cup Brazil in 2014, a section of the Nanjing City Wall was used as a big screen.

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25.782 kilometers.

This is the length of Nanjing city wall at the ground level, as recorded by the Jiangsu Provincial Bureau of Surveying Mapping and Geoinformation in a field survey in 2010.

This is the most accurate measurement recorded thus far among all the reams of materials relating to these city walls, which date back to the Ming Dynasty. This data means that the Nanjing city walls have become the longest preserved in the world after 650 years of evolving history.

In 1366, Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, gave orders to complete the construction plan of his palace and Nanjing city.

Under Zhu’s reign, a series of city walls, royal palaces and temples rose up in Nanjing, called Yingtianfu at that time. He recruited a number of artisans and laborers, and spent a lot of money and materials to tear down old buildings and build up new ones. This great construction project lasted for 28 years. A new layout, consisting of the palace city, the imperial city, the capital city and the outer city, was finally completely finished in 1393.

The Nanjing city walls are majestic and solid. Its city wall moat layout not only inherited the traditional construction mechanisms of ancient Chinese capital cities, but was also based on Nanjing’s unique geomorphic conditions, creatively combining Nanjing’s mountains with cities and integrating waters with moats.

The city construction both utilized architectural features to satisfy the demand of imperial power, and tightly connected nature with the city structure, corresponding to the ancient theory of “unity of man and nature.” 

For the construction method, Nanjing city walls adopted many different modes of construction, which reflected artisans’ superb skills that reached a peak at that time. And its architectural style played a crucial role in promoting a nationwide wave of building fortifications in the Ming and Qing dynasties.

For the building materials, Nanjing city walls combined bricks with special adhesives to heighten and thicken the fortifications in terms of topographic conditions, which made them the most solid city walls in China at that time.

Today, the fortifications are relatively well preserved, and haven’t lost their majestic style. The reason why Nanjing city walls are among the best preserved in China is that they are closely connected with the central and local governments’ timely protection plans.

In 2014, the Nanjing city walls were fully opened to the public. These ancient fortifications optimize the modern city layout and have provided local people with a new cultural and leisure space.