Skip the city wall and the Confucius Temple crowds — this route is stationery stores, vintage racks, and a tea bar that treats leaves like specialiyy coffee.
Nanjing gets filed under “history trip” more often than it should. The museums and old streetsare worth an afternoon each, sure, but the more interesting stretch of the city is the one Singaporean tourists usually walk past — a run of independent stores between 新街口 and 鼓楼 that most guidebooks don’t bother with.
This list is a single walkable route, arranged south to north, so you can knock out most of it in one afternoon without doubling back. Art stores, vintage clothing racks, a tea bar with a filter-coffee brewing method, and a gallery that changes its entire premise every season.
1. NIJO 二条商店
Spread across a three-storey standalone building on 丰富路, the ground floor runs NIJO Coffee alongside CDs, vinyl, and Tokyobike bicycles. The second floor is where the actual shopping happens — original NIJO merchandise, fragrance, stationery, and outdoor gear, with a gift-wrapping counter and a Polaroid photo station tucked into the corner. The third floor narrows into a proper tableware section, stocked with Japanese handmade ceramics and vintage tea ware.
Location: 丰富路101号小白楼1-5楼
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/dAZRn6i33Po
2. Art Deco(南台巷店)
A five-minute detour if you’re already walking 南台巷.
This gift store in Nanjing doesn’t chase a theme the way most of the stops on this list do — it’s a smaller, browsable stock of cards, trinkets, and small home objects, the kind that don’t scream souvenir shop.
Location: 南台巷9-5号
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/VMGbjAu5DM
3. 好好好商店
The cheapest stickers on this entire route in Nanjing, hands down.
Tucked into 俞家巷 a short walk from 新街口地铁站15号口, this is the stop to hit before the pricier stationery stores further along .
Location: 俞家巷3-4(新街口地铁站15号口步行450米)
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/TjvrbIe0BF
4. 山外冇茶
This is the tea bar that brews leaves the way a speciality cafe brews coffee.
Alongside proper seating and a full range of tea leaves for sale, 山外冇茶 offers a V60-style brewing option instead of traditional steeping. Running fresh water through the leaves in short, continuous pours pulls out a lighter, cleaner cup with less of the tannic bitterness that builds up when leaves sit steeping in the same water — closer to how a pour-over reads brighter than a French press.
A full tasting session runs ¥116 per person.
Location: 南台巷5-1号(新街口地铁站15号口步行490米)
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/TfeT0ec3M2
5. 宏伟古籍书店
Not much here that a Singaporean reader would pick up, and that’s the point.
The stock is almost entirely Chinese-language — textbooks, research volumes, history, and philosophy — but it’s a genuinely good source for coffee table books or a vintage collection piece.
A few boxes near the back hold old CDs, vinyl, and tape recordings of Chinese and Cantonese pop stars, the kind of find you won’t come across twice.
Location: 青岛路10-102号
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/TaGnouRagi
6. 南京市朧月古美术中古商店(汉口路店)
Worth a proper window-shop even if you’re not buying.
This is one of the more legitimate vintage stores in the city for old ceramics, glassware, and metalware, with proper pieces running into the hundreds and sometimes thousands of yuan. No photos allowed inside, and the prices reflect it — but the quality is obvious the moment you pick something up.
Location: 汉口路40-4号
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/Tx012a496u
7. NONO ART
Smaller than NIJO, but the stock here feels more unique.
Stickers and postcards make up most of the shelf space, plus a free stamp station right at the door. The plushies are the real draw — I walked out with an onigiri.
Location: 汉口路40号-6号
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/TytC0W1g8FF
8. 101 VINTAGE STORE(汉口路店)
American vintage, not the up-cycled kind.
The racks lean hard into Levis and Carhartt, curated rather than dumped in bins like a typical thrift store — but the variety is narrow. Good if you want branded pieces at a discount, but it’s not the stop if you’re hunting for one-off finds you can’t replicate elsewhere.
Location: 湖南路街道汉口路40号-2
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/TNu3jQE02y
9. HOTSTUFF
Local artist Justine opened this space to show off the different eras of her own work, and it’s turned into a wider showcase for other Chinese artists’ pieces and handicrafts too.
Location: 江苏省南京市鼓楼区汉口路48号
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/UVrjjcdEI
10. 老宇宙商店
The second most interesting spread on this list, right after NONO ART.
Alongside the usual artsy stationery, this store also carries fragrances and a Delivery-themed blind box series (S4) for $1 a box. Everything in the line is shaped like a piece of a delivery run — mini crates, bottles, boxes, trays — cute enough that you’ll end up buying more than one just to see what else is in the set.
Location: 陶谷新村4-4101号
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/Ujww5Av5B3
11. 挚馥
You won’t leave smelling like anyone else.
This fragrance store runs a DIY perfume workshop from $35 for 30ml, and the scent names alone are worth the visit — think “vulgarity” and “road to hell” sitting on the same shelf as anything more conventional.
Location: 陶谷新村4-4号
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/U7OpSy17cQP
12. 牯岭画廊COOLINGGALLERY
The entire premise changes with the season.
This exhibition space rotates its artist and theme regularly — when I visited in July 2026, the artist on display had built his entire body of work around AI-generated pieces made with Nano Banana. Worth checking what’s up before you go, since the show you see is unlikely to be the show that’s there next time.
Location: 展览馆 牯岭路7-1(灵隐路与牯岭路交叉口)
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/V2lCYO1A4WC
13. 先锋书店(颐和书馆)
Nanjing’s most popular bookstore chain, and this branch comes with a built-in reason to linger.
It sits right by 颐和路, which isn’t an official tourist attraction but has become one of the city’s most photographed streets regardless — pale yellow walls, a touch of old Chinese architecture, and huge trees lining the road. The store itself runs three storeys: books on the ground floor, a café on the second, and a rotating special exhibition on the third.
Location: 江苏路39号
Amap link: https://surl.amap.com/8QzIGgWhbQW
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