This article explores the intricate relationship between guidebooks and place-making in an early modern Chinese city, Nanjing. Despite all apparent similarity to a modern guidebook, the seventeenth-century guidebook Jinling tuyong (Illustrated Odes on Nanjing) offers no information regarding shopping, dining or lodging; instead, it catalogues all the possible experiences of sites in and around the city. Such a concentrated focus on spatial experiences brings to light an important change in the social role of guidebooks in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century China. As landscape appreciation developed into an important venue for status performance and social networking, the representation of space became an integral element to the construction of urban communities. In the case of Tuyong, its images even supplied a critical source of cultural continuity for Nanjing-neses during transition between the Ming and Qing empires, a finding that sheds a new light on the links between urban space and empire and serves as a useful entry for cross-cultural comparison.