Neither of these cities is famous for what it is today. Nanjing spent the better part of two thousand years opening and closing as somebody's capital — six dynasties by the local count, the founding Ming empire, the 1912 Republic — and lost the title every single time. Richmond spent four years as the only capital the Confederacy ever had, and lost that title once, permanently, in April 1865. Both cities kept a smaller consolation prize: Nanjing still runs Jiangsu province, Richmond still runs the Commonwealth of Virginia. Neither ever got the big job back.
That's the parallel this page is built on. Not "cheap city vs. expensive city" — both come out roughly mid-table on cost. The real comparison is what it's like to live somewhere that still introduces itself by a title it no longer fully holds.
01 — Neither cheap, neither brutal
Both land in the same mid-table bracket, in their own currency
Here are the headline numbers, each city in its own currency and in dollars for comparison.
*Paper figures. Nanjing at ¥7.2 = $1, see the Nanjing deep-dive for sourcing. Richmond rent and income from 2026 U.S. market and Census-derived trackers (Zumper, RentCafe, City Affordability); after-tax pay is an estimate net of federal, Virginia state, and payroll tax. Sources below.
Almost nobody would call either city expensive, and almost nobody would call either one a bargain. Rent eats a little under two-thirds of a typical individual's take-home pay in both — worse than the cheapest cities in this series, better than the most extreme ones.
One more thing worth flagging here, since the headstat bar above raised it: Richmond's own average take-home pay ($2,450) actually sits just under the low end of its own compiled all-in cost range ($2,600–2,900). That's not a typo or a rounding issue — it's the same "average salary describes almost nobody" problem this site has already documented in cities like Shanghai, just showing up on the American side of a comparison for the first time. A genuinely average earner in Richmond, by this page's own math, comes up short of a genuinely average cost of living. This page has no data on how that gap actually gets closed in practice — a second income, savings, family help, cheaper-than-average housing — and isn't going to guess. Nanjing's own average clears its range, if only barely.
Neither number — the ratio, the phantom-salary gap — is the most interesting thing on this page, though. Nanjing shows up in this site's own Five Kinds of Cheap framework as a Bonus entry rather than one of the five main categories, precisely because "historical leftover, not actually cheap" doesn't fit any of them cleanly. If you want to run your own numbers against either city's ratio instead of taking this page's word for it, the move calculator uses the same figures. What's actually interesting here is why both cities ended up mid-table instead of at either extreme — and that traces back to the same lost job.
02 — The bigger job, lost twice over
One title ended over and over. The other ended once, and stuck.
The shape of the loss is different, and worth being precise about. Nanjing's capital status was never permanently revoked — it was repeatedly relocated. The Ming court moved the seat of power to Beijing within decades of building Nanjing's wall. The 1912 Republic's government drifted, splintered, and eventually left too. Each time, a new regime could plausibly have brought the title back to Nanjing, and occasionally did. The pattern is opening and closing, not a single door slam.
Richmond's loss was a single, final event. It was the Confederacy's only capital for essentially its entire four-year existence, and when Richmond fell to Union forces in April 1865, the Confederacy itself ceased to exist days later. There was no version of history where that capital status came back, because the government it belonged to was gone. Nanjing's history is a door that kept opening and closing. Richmond's is a door that closed once and was welded shut.
Both cities kept a real, functioning consolation prize, though: Nanjing has been Jiangsu's provincial capital continuously since the Qing dynasty reorganized the provinces, and Richmond has been Virginia's state capital since 1779 — through the Confederacy and past it, uninterrupted for nearly two and a half centuries. Neither city actually vanished into the footnotes. They just permanently downgraded from the job everyone remembers them for.
That smaller job, though, turns out to come with its own demotion attached.
03 — The rival next door
Capital doesn't mean biggest. Both cities have proof of that living a short drive away.
Here's the twist that makes the parallel sharper: in both cases, the provincial or state capital isn't even the largest or richest city in its own jurisdiction. Nanjing is Jiangsu's capital, but Suzhou — a short high-speed rail ride away — has long been the province's largest economy, an old local joke that every Jiangsu resident knows and every Nanjing civic booster half-resents. Richmond is Virginia's capital, but Virginia Beach, on the coast, is the commonwealth's largest city by population, and the Washington, D.C. metro pulls economic gravity toward Virginia's northern suburbs instead of toward Richmond.
Being the seat of government, in other words, stopped being the same thing as being the center of gravity — in China and in America, for almost identical structural reasons. The capital keeps the palace, the archives, and the museums. The money finds its own address.
Both cities, in fact, sit on a fast rail spine connecting them to the bigger neighbor that outranks them — Nanjing's high-speed line to Suzhou and Shanghai, Richmond's Amtrak corridor up to Washington. Neither train erases the gap in gravity. Both just make it a short, frequent trip to go stand in it.
04 — What it actually costs, day to day
Below the headline rent, a meter and a mortgage that tell a sharper story
None of that — the province, the rival city, the train — shows up on a monthly bill. This is where the comparison gets down to what actually lands in a bank account. Rent is the number everyone asks for first, but it's not where the two cities diverge hardest. The meter on the wall and the price of buying your way out of the local default — a private school seat instead of the neighborhood assignment — both open up gaps the rent ledger doesn't show.
Utilities: a tiered meter against a flat one
Nanjing settles electricity, water, and gas annually against three usage tiers, the structure this whole series already uses. Richmond's utility, Dominion Energy, runs the opposite way — an essentially flat residential rate with no meaningful tier structure at all, so there's no clean tier-for-tier row to build. The honest comparison is a computed effective rate against a stated flat one, not a matched table.
| City | Structure | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| Nanjing | 3 tiers, annual | ¥0.53–0.83/kWh≈$0.074–0.115 |
| Richmond | Flat, monthly | ≈15.5¢/kWhVirginia average, EIA/EnergySage; no tiers |
| City | Structure | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|
| Nanjing | 3 tiers, annual | ¥3.42–7.02/m³≈$0.48–0.98 |
| Richmond | Flat volume + service charge | ≈$3.35/Ccf≈$1.18/m³, plus a monthly service charge; water and wastewater billed separately |
Nanjing: Nanjing Municipal Development and Reform Commission notices, see the Nanjing deep-dive for full sourcing. Richmond electricity: Virginia's own EIA-reported average residential rate and EnergySage's real-bill-derived average, both July 2026, converge around 15–17.4¢/kWh — no single Dominion Energy headline rate exists the way Nanjing's tiers do, so this is a representative average, not a quoted tariff line. Richmond water: City of Richmond Department of Public Utilities rate schedule, effective July 1, 2026 ($3.35/Ccf volume charge plus a meter-size service charge; 1 Ccf = 100 cubic feet ≈ 2.83 m³). Converted at ¥7.2 = $1.
The surprise here: on electricity specifically, the two cities land closer together than the rent gap would suggest — Nanjing's top tier and Richmond's flat rate are both in the same rough band, once converted. It's water where the systems genuinely diverge, because Richmond bills water and sewer as two separate line items on top of a fixed service charge, a structure Nanjing's bundled per-m³ rate doesn't have at all.
The meter is the small, recurring gap. The next two numbers are the one-time and the elective ones — what it costs to actually own a piece of either city, and what it costs to opt out of it entirely.
Buying in, and the exit fee from the local default
Two more numbers only make sense side by side. First, what it costs to actually own property in each city's center versus its outer ring; second, what it costs a family to opt out of the local public-school assignment entirely — Nanjing's international-school circuit for non-local families, Richmond's well-known private-school tier for everyone else.
| City | Center | Outside center |
|---|---|---|
| Nanjing | ≈¥30,000≈$4,167 | ≈¥18,500≈$2,569 |
| Richmond | ≈$3,230Fan District, premium historic stock | ≈$2,470Citywide median, converted from $/sq ft |
Nanjing: local listing aggregators (Fang.com, Anjuke), core-district (Gulou/Jianye/Xuanwu/Qinhuai) resale average vs. citywide resale average, both mid-2026 — a directly-sourced range, not a Numbeo figure (Numbeo's own per-square-foot listing for Nanjing did not reconcile with any local source checked and was set aside rather than used). Richmond: Redfin citywide median sale price per square foot (≈$252, Feb 2026) for the outside-center figure; Mission Realty's Fan District neighborhood guide (≈$290–375/sq ft, July 2026, midpoint used) for the center figure. Converted at 1 sq ft = 0.0929 m², and ¥7.2 = $1.
Center reverses nothing here — Nanjing's core districts and Richmond's Fan District are both the expensive end of their own city, in line with almost every other city pair in this series. What's genuinely comparable is the multiple: Nanjing's center runs about 1.6× its own outer ring; Richmond's Fan District runs about 1.3× the city median. Nanjing's scarcity premium on the old core is the sharper of the two, largely because non-local buyers face purchase restrictions that push more demand toward a fixed set of central parcels — a Jiangsu-specific version of the same land-scarcity logic this site has already covered in Hangzhou and Shanghai.
| City | Typical annual tuition |
|---|---|
| NanjingNanjing International School, a representative primary-grade year | ≈¥150,000≈$20,833 |
| RichmondCollegiate / St. Christopher's, a representative elementary-grade year | ≈$24,000 |
Nanjing International School's own published fee schedule for the 2026–27 year runs roughly ¥141,900–399,750 depending on grade; ≈¥150,000 is a representative early-grade figure, not an average across all grades. Richmond figures from Collegiate School's own published 2024–25 schedule ($19,560–32,820) and St. Christopher School's 2026–27 schedule; ≈$24,000 is a representative elementary-grade figure from that range. Converted at ¥7.2 = $1.
Two price tags that look like the same thing are measuring something different. A Richmond family paying $24,000 a year is opting out of a public system it could legally use for free — a choice about school quality and, often, class. A non-hukou Nanjing family paying international-school tuition is very often not opting out of anything: it's routing around a residency-tied public-school assignment it may not have access to in the first place. Converted to the same currency, the two numbers land within a few thousand dollars of each other — despite Richmond's average take-home pay running roughly twice Nanjing's. Whatever this "exit fee" is buying, it isn't priced the way the rest of each city is.
None of that — the meter, the mortgage, the tuition check — is what either city actually sells to a visitor. What both cities sell is the thing they lost.
05 — Selling the loss back to you
Both cities turned the lost job into the thing tourists actually pay for
Neither city tries very hard to hide its diminished status — both have built a real slice of the local economy around visiting the ghost of the bigger job. Nanjing's Confucius Temple quarter, Ming city wall, and Sun Yat-sen's mausoleum are its highest-traffic tourist draws — the Nanjing deep-dive covers the wall and the everyday city behind it in more depth — and the pitch is explicitly historical: come see what a capital used to look like. Richmond runs the same play with the American Civil War Museum, the Virginia State Capitol, and the walkable Civil War battlefield sites ringing the city — the pitch there is just as explicit, if considerably heavier: come see where the Confederacy ended.
Nanjing
1,800 yrs
approximate span across which Nanjing has opened and closed as a capital, on and off
The wall, the mausoleum, the old lanes — all built or expanded during a capital-era, all still standing and still the top tourist draw, all monetized through a heritage district built to sell that history back to visitors nightly.
The past is lit up and ticketed.
Richmond
4 yrs
the entire span of Richmond's only stint as a national-level capital, 1861–1865
A much shorter capital-era, but a far heavier one to memorialize — the city's tourism infrastructure has to hold both "seat of a rebellion" and "site of its collapse" in the same set of museums, a genuinely harder needle to thread than Nanjing's.
The past is preserved and complicated.
Both cities monetize the loss. Only one of them has to explain what the loss was actually for.
06 — The honest brake
What the parallel doesn't cover
First, the historical weight isn't remotely equivalent, and this page shouldn't be read as flattening it. Nanjing's lost capital-eras are, for the most part, comfortably distant history that the city can present with civic pride. Richmond's is recent enough, and tied closely enough to slavery and its defense, that "capital of the Confederacy" carries a moral weight Nanjing's résumé simply doesn't have to reckon with in the same way. The structural parallel — capital, demoted, outranked by a neighbor — holds. The emotional and political weight of what each capital actually stood for does not transfer between them, and I'm not trying to make it.
Second, this is a genuinely lopsided comparison on the author's side: I've returned to Nanjing repeatedly since 1999 and have never lived there full-time; I have never set foot in Richmond at all. Everything on the Richmond side of this page comes from public data and general reference sources, not a sidewalk. Weigh that column accordingly.
Both cities are still capitals. Neither one is the capital anyone actually remembers them for.
If you're choosing between them
Deciding on more than the number
- The money is close to a wash. Both land around 59–61% of a local individual's after-tax pay on a city-center one-bedroom — mid-table for this project, not a bargain and not brutal in either currency.
- Neither city is the economic center of its own province or state. If you want the bigger, richer neighbor instead, that's Suzhou on the Nanjing side and Virginia Beach or Northern Virginia on the Richmond side — a different trip entirely.
- Know which kind of history you're buying into. Nanjing sells distant, civic-pride history. Richmond sells recent, unresolved history. Neither is a bad reason to visit — but they're not the same kind of museum.
07 — Questions people actually ask
Quick answers
Are Nanjing and Richmond similarly priced?
Yes — both land in the same mid-table cost bracket in their own currencies, neither cheap nor brutal by their national standards.
Were Nanjing and Richmond both national capitals?
Yes — both lost a bigger, national-level capital title for good, and both currently watch a larger city in their own province or state outrank them.
Do Nanjing and Richmond each have a rival city nearby?
Yes — both have a larger, more prominent city a short drive away that outranks them today.
How do the two cities monetize their lost capital status today?
Both turned the lost job into a tourism draw — the history of having once been the capital is now something visitors specifically pay to see in each city.
What's the honest limitation of this Nanjing-Richmond comparison?
The comparison's own honest-brake section flags specific ways the historical parallel doesn't fully hold, rather than presenting it as a perfect match.