Attractions of Nanjing

My topic for our final project is the attractions of Nanjing. In fact, the specific page name I chose for our final project is my personalized list of the top 30 attractions that I encourage people to visit while they are traveling in Nanjing. I had strong confidence that this general topic will have a good number of relevant pages on Wikipedia because Nanjing is such a city with time-honored culture and history that I have much to talk and write about. When choosing the data source, considering that lots of articles that describe the city of Nanjing are written in Chinese, all of my data of Nanjing is from Wikipedia which is written formally in English.

Nanjing is the capital city of Jiangsu Provence situated in the Yangtze River Delta region. It has a prominent place in Chinese history and culture. It served as the capital of various Chinese dynasties, kingdoms and republican governments dating from the 3rd century to 1949, and has thus long been a major center of culture, education, research, politics, economy, and tourism. I love this city and I am delighted that I could have a chance to spread its culture to a wider population.

As mentioned before, the selection of pages is actually my top 30 recommendations of tourist attractions for visitors. Considering Nanjing has a long and rich history that can date back to almost 1,000 years ago, my list is almost dominated by historical attractions. However, considering that each tourist may have different demands and expectations of their traveling experiences, I also added other types of attractions in my list. For instance, if families are traveling to Nanjing with their children, they might want to visit Nanjing University of Science and Technology to get a taste of the academic ambience of one of the best Universities in Jiangsu Province.

The order of my list is particular interesting. Initially, I ordered these attractions according to their publicity. I soon realized that often, the wider the publicity one attraction has, the longer history it tends to have. So the top rank of my list tend to be historical attractions and their establishment usually goes back to a long time ago. For instance, the No.1 of my list, City Wall of Nanjing, was designed by Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang in 1368. The more recent-constructed attractions such as Hongshan Forest Zoo, Nanjing Underwater World and Deji Plaza are ranked lower in my list. Noticeably, I also added a peculiarly distinctive food which might seem to be an outlier, named duck blood and vermicelli soup, at the bottom of my list. I add this dish because it is one of the most famous traditional delicacy of Nanjing. Personally, I do believe that having good food is a vital part when travelling and food has always been an indispensable element of my travel plan.

Born in Nanjing, I have seen people flock to the tourist attractions with busy schedules and end up with the exhausting body and unpleasant traveling experience. So I have always wanted to design a website or an app to optimize the traveling experience for tourists. Specifically, I want to design a multimedia guide system, available both for the tourist attractions and tourists to download and operate, offering tailored travelling routes for people with different needs and background. It features intelligent tourist advising service by reviewing necessary historical background information and synchronized introduction for the spot you are currently visiting in a language you prefer. Instead of only seeing what the spot looks like, it can enrich the experience, facilitate tourists’ interpretation about the sites and save a plenty of time for tourists. So the initial will of designing this website is to draw people’s attention and provide them with an opportunity to explore more on Nanjing’s various attractions.

In general, my topic gives a pretty nice cluster: temples, mountains and museums are clearly clustered together. With a closer observation, Presidential Palace stands out to me because of its distinguishing number of sections. It has 27 sections compared to second-largest section number, 12 which is shown Nanjing Underwater World. Presidential Palace housed the Office of the President of the Republic of China since 1927. According to my observation, the number of section is particularly large because, Wikipedia gives an exhaustive description on it architectural structure which includes main gate, main hall, second hall, reception hall and etc. And those specifications are not made in the other topics. The reason that Presidential Palace is particularly having a comprehensive introduction on it architectural structure is because Presidential Palace is a milestone on the modern history of architecture and it is one of the largest surviving complex of modern Chinese buildings.

I noticed that the change of history of the first paragraph over time of Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum is quite interesting. Overall, the writing of the first paragraph does not change much over time, except that in 2012, the sentence “It is classified as a AAAAA scenic area by the China National Tourism Administration” is added at the end of the first paragraph. Nevertheless, the sentence was recalled in 2016. I did further research regarding this phenomenon and found that Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum was classified as a AAAAA scenic area in 2006. This finding makes the specific change in 2016 even more perplexing. Initially, I thought Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum is classified as a AAAAA scenic area in 2006 and that is reason that Wikipedia was adding the specific instruction on Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum. At this point, the reason of both the addition and the subtraction of that sentence remain elusive.

There are many other interesting and specific observations you can find on my website. Nevertheless, I will just give some conclusion regarding my project and leave the rest for you to further explore on my website. Overall, my pages have a clear cluster, concerning templates, mountain, and museums. It is very convenient for visitors who have a particular preferences to search related sites in Nanjing. Hence, I higly encourage people to use my webstie to customize their own traveling list when visiting Nanjing.