Meiling Palace (美龄宫) is the villa built for Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling on the slopes of Purple Mountain, completed in 1934. The building is a graceful two-storey structure in a hybrid Chinese-Western style, with decorative tiles on the roof in the traditional manner but Western interior arrangements. The surrounding landscape design, with circular plant beds visible from above, gives the villa the appearance of a Chinese necklace — an intentional tribute to Soong Mei-ling, it is said.
The villa is now open as a museum covering the Republican era, with period furniture, documentary photographs, and exhibits on the Nationalist government's years in Nanjing. The forested hillside setting is pleasant and the building itself is photogenic. It sits within the same mountain complex as the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, easily combined on the same visit.