The western side of Purple Mountain, one of the area’s highest peak, is home to one of China’s oldest astronomical observatories. This area features not one but a few telescopes, as well as some ancient Chinese astronomical instruments, and some great bushwalks that will surely test the unfit person.
If you catch the number 20 bus (for example from Hankou Xi Lu), as soon as you get off, there’s a fork in the road – to the right takes you to the cable-car up the mountain, and to the left takes you up the walking path. For the more adventurous, you’ll see a good number of people taking a shortcut up a steep goat track in the hill to your right, after only a few minute’s walk up the road. If you like bushwalking with a bit of a challenge, this is the route you want to take. You can climb up to the top of a huge boulder on top of the hill (after maybe half an hour’s climb), which gives a great view of Xuanwu Hu (Xuanwu Lake). At regular intervals on the way, there’s people selling bottles of water and cucumbers (yep, cucumbers). Once you’re up there, you pay 12 yuan to get into the observatory (or only 8 if you have a student card).
There’s only a few things to see inside, but some are damn impressive – for instance the “Abridged Armilla”, a large cast-metal astronomical measuring tool, which looks like a Chinese version of something from a David Cronenberg film, with slender metal dragons gracing the legs of an archway which houses what could be called star-tracking rings. There’s two of them, and they’re impressively odd enough to warrant being stolen by foreign armies during the second Opium War circa 1900, and thus they lived for some years in Germany and France. They date back to 1437, and if you’ve been to a Chinese museum or two, you’ll know how incredibly advanced metalworking skills were in ancient China. These are no exception.
After seeing this, then you have the option of walking to the top of the taller mountain (this is another 30 to 50 minute walk, depending how fit you are and how fast you usually walk). However, there’s not much to see up there, unless you go very early in the morning (around 6am), at which time you can see groups of locals singing, dancing and sometimes painting. It’s very popular, since walking up here regularly will be enough to keep you fit. If you don’t want to walk, then the cable-car from the bottom is 60 yuan return, or 35 yuan one way (or if you are a “child under 1.3 metres”, it’s 25/15 yuan). You can also catch buses 3 and 315 to the same bus stop, or bus 91, which goes to the taller mountain. Alternatively, most taxi drivers know it. There’s also a Yosmite Chinese/western restaurant just outside the observatory gates.
