Kumasi has been the Asante capital since the 1680s, and its history is written in shrine walls, in a sword nobody may pull, and in a fort the British held under siege. Three days trace the kingdom from Okomfo Anokye's founding oath to Yaa Asantewaa's last war.
The iron sword the priest Okomfo Anokye drove into the earth around 1695, when the Golden Stool descended and the Asante union was sworn. It sits under a small canopy inside Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital; attendants tell the oath story.
Opened in 1995 in the Centre for National Culture, this small museum holds Asantehene Prempeh II's regalia, war stools, gold weights and a replica of the Golden Stool. Guides walk you through Asante stool succession and the exile of 1896.
One of ten surviving Asante shrines inscribed by UNESCO in 1980, and the best preserved. Built of wattle, mud and thatch with bas-relief adinkra spirals, it dates to the 19th century and served the god Kwaku Firi; the drum courtyard is intact.
Where Asante kings have been laid since the British razed the original Bantama mausoleum in 1896. The compound is closed to the public, but the walk through Breman past the royal ancestral grounds is how Kumasi's oldest quarter still guards its dead.
The Ejisuhemaa who led the 1900 rising against Governor Hodgson's demand for the Golden Stool. The original museum burned in 2004 with her sandals and battle dress; the rebuilt site tells the siege of Kumasi Fort and her exile to the Seychelles.
The Sekondi line reached Kumasi in 1903, three years after the war, hauling cocoa and manganese to the coast and cementing colonial control of the interior. The station buildings and old goods yard survive; passenger service has long been dormant.
Founded 1952 as the Kumasi College of Technology and renamed for Nkrumah, this was independent Ghana's engineering project in built form. The College of Art holds Ghanaian modernist work; the 1960s halls are textbook tropical modernism.
Methodist missionaries reached Kumasi in the 1840s; the cathedral anchors Adum, the commercial grid the British laid out after 1901 when Ashanti became a colony. Bank buildings and trading houses from the cocoa boom still line the streets.
The royal weaving village, 18km northeast, where kente was traditionally woven for the Asantehene alone and commoners were barred from certain patterns. Weavers still work narrow treadle looms; every strip pattern carries a proverb name.
Adinkra cloth was worn for funerals and, by tradition, taken from the defeated Gyaman king Adinkra around 1818. Here badie bark is boiled into kuntunkuni dye and calabash stamps press symbols by hand, exactly as recorded by Bowdich in 1817.
The carvers' village on the Mampong road, working sese wood into akuaba fertility dolls and the stools that in Asante custom hold a person's soul. Blackened ancestral stools are the reason stool-carving was a court-controlled craft.
The zongo grew from the Hausa and Wangara trading settlements that carried kola north across the Sahel long before the British arrived, and expanded when colonial troops were quartered here. Twi, Hausa and Dagbani all trade on the same street.