Yangshan Quarry is one of Nanjing's stranger imperial leftovers: a Ming stone quarry where three colossal unfinished stele pieces still lie in the rock. They were intended for the Xiaoling tomb of the Hongwu Emperor, but the scale was so impractical that the project was abandoned before the blocks could be moved.
The site is outside the central city, so it takes more effort than Nanjing's museum-and-wall circuit, but the reward is physical. The stone pieces are so large that they make imperial ambition feel less abstract; you can see the point at which engineering, labour and royal ego ran into the limits of reality.