The Yangzhou Museum is big. Any visitor to Yangzhou quickly finds out the city is proud of its history, but you don’t really get a feel for its age until you visit this newly constructed museum. There are extensive displays here of artifacts, crafts, models and so on from Yangzhou’s pre-history to the Qing Dynasty, with plenty about the future as well.

Nearly every exhibit includes informative, intelligible English captions.

Starting at the top, the 3rd floor is a vast history section that sprawls through thousands of years along with a multi-floor block printing exhibit with live demonstrations and a huge library of printing blocks.

The 2nd floor exhibits Yangzhou's love for the skill of carving various materials into art. Intricately carved jade, bamboo, stone, porcelain, peach pits (incredible!), and wood objects are on display, spanning around two thousand years. The 2nd floor also features a painting and calligraphy exhibit of the famous Yangzhou “Eight Eccentric” artists, and a huge Tang Dynasty dragon boat.

The 1st floor is a 'model lovers' dream. There is an enormous model of a somewhat unrealistic, albeit futuristic city plan and a statistical frenzy of graphs and data hanging on the walls.

Strangely enough, visitors emerge from displays of Yangzhou's beautiful and proud culture back outside into the modern day China of construction and homogenous housing blocks.

Allow about an hour and a half to visit the museum, which is certainly worthwhile for appreciating one of China’s most legendary cities.

Bus numbers 26 (running the length of Wenchang Road), 308, and 22 all stop at the museum. A cab ride from the center of town should cost around 15 Yuan.

That Lupu Bridge is open to the public is a well kept secret, either that or nobody has any interest in climbing one of the major artieries that links Puxi to Pudong over the Huangpu River. The bridge was deserted even on National Day when the rest of Shanghai was heaving with visitors. Lupu Bridge is the longest arch bridge in the world, the white arches have 367 steps which lead to the top of the bridge with the Huangpu River, teeming with commercial traffic, over 100 metres below.

The view from the top is further removed from the bright lights of Lujiazui. Instead it offers a telling insight into Shanghai’s history and contrasting future. On the Puxi side it offers a look at an old shipyard. It is the last of Shanghai’s heavy industry within the city limits, everything else was moved to the outskirts in an effort to combat pollution and the shipyard will shortly follow suit. The Pudong side is at present nothing more than a building site but a massive construction project is underway along the banks of the Huangpu for the Shanghai 2010 Expo, otherwise trumpeted as the Olympic Games of the economy, science, and technology. The view is interesting if only to the see the scale of the project and knowing the pace of construction will be ready in the time it takes to knock down the shipyard on the opposite bank.

The 186 hectare Nanjing Botanical Garden is a fine place to escape the crowds of Nanjing city.  Inside the garden are 100s of Bonsai trees, roses, a greenhouse with cacti, succulents and foliage plants, 10 meter tall Magnolia trees and many other types of plants.

Bridge World

Totally unrelated to the theme of the rest of the park, included inside the gardens is a place called 桥世界 (Qiao Shijie) which translates into "Bridge World".  It includes a series of obstacle bridges.  During weekdays it receives very few visitors, but it is still staffed and well-maintained.  There is no additional fee to enter Bridge World, but for an extra 5 yuan you can ride a bamboo raft in the pond.

How to Get There:

Tourist bus #3 (游3) as well as bus numbers 20w and 315w stop at the entrance.  Taxis pass by occasionally but are not nearly as plentiful as they are in the city.