Celebrating its 400th birthday this year is a travel guide which turned out to be the Lonely Planet of its day, serving as an introduction to a couple of score of Nanjing’s scenic spots. As for it being the world’s oldest, we’ll get to that later.
In 1623, Ming Dynasty calligrapher and painter, Zhu Zhifan, compiled 40 Nanjing scenic spots with accompanying poetry and invited Lu Shoubai to paint pictures to go with them.
That book became “Jinling in Pictures & Song” (金陵图咏), a unique Nanjing travel guide that is now 400 years old.
The book depicts various scenes of Nanjing’s then downtown; shops, restaurants, teahouses, pawnshops, bookstores, banks, antique shops, handicraft workshops, etc.
Then there are government offices, temples, private residences, divination halls, theatres and so on. The streets and alleys are seen to be crisscrossing, full of traffic. It’s a bustling scene, not entirely unlike today.
More than a thousand different people can also be identified in “Jinling in Pictures & Song”, in addition to as many as 109 shop signs featured therein.
As to whether or not it’s genuine, historians believe so. They point to similarities with “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”, a hand-scroll painting that captured daily life in the then-capital, Bianjing, a work also thought of as China’s Mona Lisa.
But that work dates from 500 years previous. Nevertheless, Wu Xiaotie, an expert on Nanjing literature and history, has pointed out the accuracies in the guide book, particularly in regard to the Nanjing City Wall.
For example, “Zhongfu Qingyun” (钟阜晴云) refers to the section of the city wall from Zhongshan Gate to Taiping Gate today, while the city gate depicted is clearly today’s Zhongshan Men. Xuanwu Lake also makes an appearance.
Professor Luo Xiaoxiang from the School of History of Nanjing University believes that “Jinling in Pictures & Song” showcases Nanjing as one of the great places in history, as Nanjing Daily reports.
And as for it being the oldest in the world, not quite, by quite a margin. That title goes to “Peregrinatio in Terram Sanctam” (Pilgrimage to the Holy Land), written by Bernhard von Breydenbach and illustrated by Erhard Reiwich. Published in 1486, the guide is housed, away from light, in the British Museum.