Wuhan

Wuhan is three cities in one. Wuchang, on the south bank, grew around a walled garrison founded in the third century, when the Yellow Crane Tower was first built as a watchtower; it became a provincial capital under the Ming and Qing. Hanyang, across the Yangtze, is nearly as old. Hankou, on the north bank of the Han River, grew under the Ming into one of China's four great market towns, handling tea, salt and grain for the whole middle Yangtze.

The Treaties of Tianjin of 1858 named Hankou a port open to foreign trade, and from 1861 British, Russian, French, German and Japanese concessions lined the riverfront with banks, consulates and warehouses; Russian firms pressed brick tea here for the overland trade to Siberia. Viceroy Zhang Zhidong made Wuhan a centre of self-strengthening industry in the 1890s, founding the Hanyang ironworks and arsenal and the province's modern schools and railways. On 10 October 1911 soldiers of the New Army mutinied in Wuchang; the uprising spread within weeks and brought down the Qing dynasty, and the date is still marked as the Double Tenth.

The three towns were formally merged as Wuhan in 1927, briefly serving as the seat of a Nationalist government and again as the Nationalist government's provisional wartime capital from 1937 until the city fell to Japanese forces late in 1938. After 1949 the city became a centre of steel, cars and heavy engineering; the first bridge across the Yangtze opened here in 1957. Catastrophic floods struck in 1931 and again in 1954. In January 2020 Wuhan was placed under an unprecedented lockdown to contain the COVID-19 outbreak, lasting into April of that year.

Wuhan's identity is bound up with the river and with the Yellow Crane Tower, whose Tang-dynasty poems — Cui Hao's above all — are learned by schoolchildren across China, and with the Chu culture of ancient Hubei, whose lacquer, silk and bronze work is displayed at the provincial museum. The chime bells from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, cast in the fifth century BC and still able to play a scale, are the city's musical emblem, and replicas are performed for visitors.

It is above all a student city. Close to a million students attend dozens of universities, and Wuhan University's cherry trees, first planted in 1939 on a campus of early twentieth-century halls, have become a national spring ritual. The concentration of young people supports a dense scene of small bars, live music venues and independent bookshops around the campus gates, and Wuhan has a long-standing reputation in Chinese rock and punk music.

Local manners surprise visitors from elsewhere in China. The Wuhan dialect is spoken fast and at volume, and bluntness is normal rather than hostile; the local phrase for a straightforward person is a compliment. Life is lived on the street in warm months: breakfast eaten walking, card games and chess on the pavement, crayfish and beer at plastic tables in summer, and dancing and badminton in the parks after dark. Residents also share a strong collective memory of the 2020 lockdown.

The 2020 census counted about 12.3 million people in the municipality, making Wuhan the most populous city in Hubei and one of the largest inland cities in China. It spreads over a plain scattered with lakes, and the Yangtze and Han divide it so thoroughly that residents often identify first with Wuchang, Hankou or Hanyang rather than with Wuhan as a whole.

The economy is broad: steel and car plants, optical-fibre and laser firms in Optics Valley, shipbuilding, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology and a very large higher-education and research sector. As a transport hub it handles freight by rail, river and air, and the port moves containers down the Yangtze to Shanghai. Construction has been relentless for two decades, with new metro lines, bridges and tunnels, and the population has grown as graduates are encouraged to stay.

Days start early with breakfast bought from a stall and eaten on the move, and commutes are long, often involving a river crossing. Summer dictates the rhythm for a third of the year: shops and offices are air-conditioned, activity shifts to early morning and late evening, and the riverside steps and lake paths fill after dark. Flooding remains a live concern in wet summers, as does the heat, and the pressure of housing costs in the districts near the universities.

Wuhan is a breakfast city, and the local word for it — guozao, "passing the morning" — describes a habit of eating out every day. The dish everyone names is reganmian, hot dry noodles: thick alkaline wheat noodles parboiled, oiled and cooled in advance, then blanched to order and tossed with sesame paste, soy, chilli oil, spring onion and chopped pickled vegetables, served dry in a paper box. Beside it come doupi, a crisp pan-fried square of tofu skin filled with glutinous rice and diced pork; mianwo, a ring-shaped fried rice-flour cake; and sweet rice wine soup with small glutinous dumplings.

The lakes and the river supply the rest. Wuchang fish, a bream, is steamed whole; lotus root, grown in the lakes of Honghu, is simmered for hours with pork ribs into a starchy soup that is a Hubei household dish. Spicy braised duck neck, sold vacuum-packed as a snack across China, was popularised in Wuhan, and the city's summer belongs to crayfish, boiled in chilli and thirteen-spice seasoning and eaten by hand at outdoor tables late into the night.

Bakeries and coffee houses have multiplied in the old concession streets, and tea remains the common drink, with Hubei's own green teas from the western mountains. Local beer is drunk cold with crayfish and skewers, and sweet fermented rice, mijiu, appears both as a breakfast soup and as a mild drink.