Tianyi Pavilion Old Town

Tianyi Pavilion, built between 1561 and 1566 by the Ming official Fan Qin, is the oldest surviving private library building in China and one of the oldest in Asia. Fan Qin accumulated over 70,000 volumes during his official career — an extraordinary collection for a private individual in the Ming — and constructed the two-storey pavilion specifically for their preservation. The upper floor was used for storage, with water-filled tanks below to provide humidity control and fire protection.

The library survived the chaos of the Taiping Rebellion (which destroyed most of Ningbo's older buildings), Japanese occupation, and the Cultural Revolution in relatively good condition, though with substantial losses to the collection. The current holdings of around 300,000 items include rare Ming woodblock editions not duplicated elsewhere in China.

Moon Lake (Yuehu), the scholarly garden lake immediately adjacent to the library, was the social centre of Ningbo's literati culture from the Song dynasty. The lake and its surrounding garden — reconstructed in the 2000s around surviving elements — provide the classical Jiangnan scholar-garden aesthetic of rockery, pavilions, and specimen trees around a reflective water surface.

The Tianfeng Pagoda, a five-storey Song dynasty brick pagoda standing on a low hill in the old town, is one of the few above-ground Tang and Song structures surviving in Ningbo. The pagoda has been repaired multiple times but retains its original masonry structure and Song-period proportions.