Central China

Henan is often called the cradle of Chinese civilisation. The Shang dynasty had capitals near Zhengzhou and at Anyang, where oracle bones carry the earliest known Chinese writing. Luoyang served as capital for the Eastern Zhou, the Eastern Han and, from 493, the Northern Wei, who began carving the Longmen Grottoes; under the Tang it was a second capital, favoured by Empress Wu Zetian. Kaifeng was the Northern Song capital, one of the largest cities in the world, until the Jurchens took it in 1127. To the south, Hubei was the core of the state of Chu, and the Battle of Red Cliffs was fought on the Yangtze here in 208.

In the Ming and Qing eras the Huizhou merchants of southern Anhui grew rich in salt and trade and built the villages around Huangshan, while Jingdezhen's kilns produced porcelain for the imperial court and for export worldwide.

Modern Chinese history turned here repeatedly. The Wuchang Uprising in Wuhan on 10 October 1911 set off the revolution that ended the Qing. The Nanchang Uprising of 1927 is celebrated as the birth of the Red Army, and the Communists built their Jiangxi Soviet around Ruijin until 1934, when the Long March began. In 1938 Nationalist forces breached the Yellow River dykes in Henan to slow the Japanese. The Great Leap famine struck Henan and Anhui hard, and the Lushan Conference of 1959 purged Marshal Peng Dehuai for criticising the Great Leap Forward. In 1978 farmers at Xiaogang in Anhui secretly divided the land among households, an early step in rural reform. The Three Gorges Dam was built in the 1990s and 2000s, and in January 2020 Wuhan was placed under an unprecedented lockdown to contain the COVID-19 outbreak.

Speech varies across the region: Henan and most of Hubei speak Mandarin dialects, Jiangxi speaks Gan, and southern Anhui has its own Hui dialects. Regional operas are strong — Yu opera in Henan, with its high, carrying voices, and Huangmei opera from Anqing in Anhui, loved for its gentle folk melodies.

Southern Anhui is the home of Hui culture: villages of whitewashed walls, black tiles and stepped "horse-head" gables, ancestral halls and memorial arches, and the carvings in brick, stone and wood of the merchants' houses. The area produces the scholar's "four treasures" — Hui ink sticks, Xuan paper, She inkstones and brushes — for calligraphy and painting. Jingdezhen still has thousands of potters and painters, many of them young artists from across China.

Religion and martial tradition are woven into the landscape. The Shaolin Temple in Henan is linked with Chan (Zen) Buddhism and kung fu, and Chenjiagou village is honoured as the home of Chen-style tai chi. Hubei's Wudang Mountains are a centre of Daoism and Daoist martial arts, Jiuhuashan in Anhui is one of Buddhism's four sacred mountains, and Longhushan in Jiangxi is associated with the Celestial Masters of Daoism. The Hubei Provincial Museum's bronze chime bells from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng are a symbol of Chu culture.

Some 260 million people live in the four provinces. Henan, one of China's most populous, is centred on Zhengzhou, with Luoyang, Kaifeng and Anyang among its old cities. Wuhan, with about 13 million people, is the largest city of the region, formed from the three towns of Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang. Hefei is Anhui's fast-growing capital and Nanchang Jiangxi's.

Farming remains important — wheat in Henan, rice and freshwater fish around the Yangtze lakes — but the region has industrialised quickly. Wuhan makes cars, steel and optical fibre and has dozens of universities, Zhengzhou assembles smartphones, and Hefei has become a hub for electric vehicles, displays and research. For decades these provinces sent tens of millions of migrant workers to the coast; more now find work closer to home.

City life runs on early breakfasts eaten on the street, long commutes, humid evenings along Wuhan's riverbanks and East Lake, and square dancing. Floods on the Yangtze and Huai rivers and summer heatwaves are recurring worries, and many villages have emptied as young people leave.

Central Chinese food is robust. Wuhan's breakfast culture is famous: re gan mian, "hot dry noodles" tossed in sesame paste, chilli oil and pickles, is the city's signature, along with doupi, a sticky-rice and tofu-skin pancake. Hubei also eats Wuchang fish, a steamed bream, and pork-rib soup with lotus root from the lakes, while spicy braised duck necks are a national snack.

Henan favours wheat: Zhengzhou's huimian, wide hand-pulled noodles in mutton broth, and hulatang, a peppery thickened soup eaten at breakfast. Luoyang's "water banquet" is a meal of many soupy courses, and Kaifeng's night market sells soup-filled guantang bao dumplings and grilled snacks.

Anhui's Hui cuisine uses ham, bamboo shoots and mushrooms from the hills. Its best-known dishes are chou guiyu, a deliberately fermented mandarin fish, and maodoufu, a fuzzy mould-fermented tofu that is fried. Jiangxi cooking favours strong, salty and spicy flavours, with Nanchang rice noodles and soups slow-cooked in clay jars. Tea is a regional pride: Huangshan Maofeng and Keemun black tea from Anhui, Xinyang Maojian from Henan, and Lushan's cloud-and-mist tea.

Southern Anhui combines Huangshan — granite peaks, gnarled pines and seas of cloud, climbed by stone stairways and cable cars — with the Hui villages of Xidi and Hongcun at its feet, the old town of Shexian and the Buddhist mountain of Jiuhuashan.

Henan holds the ancient core. The Shaolin Temple and its Pagoda Forest of monks' tombs lie on Mount Song near Dengfeng; south of Luoyang, the Longmen Grottoes line both banks of the Yi river, with the great seated Vairocana Buddha of the Fengxian Temple at their centre, and the White Horse Temple is traditionally counted as China's first Buddhist temple. Kaifeng has the Iron Pagoda and its night market, and Anyang has the Yinxu ruins of the Shang capital.

In Hubei, Wuhan has the Yellow Crane Tower above the Yangtze, East Lake and the Hubei Provincial Museum. Upriver, the Xiling Gorge, the easternmost of the Three Gorges, leads to the Three Gorges Dam near Yichang, where cruises from the upper Yangtze end; the Daoist temples of the Wudang Mountains and the forests of Shennongjia lie to the north-west. Jiangxi has Jingdezhen's imperial kiln site and ceramics museums, the misty peaks and colonial-era villas of Lushan above Poyang Lake — China's largest freshwater lake and a winter refuge for cranes — the granite pillars of Sanqingshan and the villages of Wuyuan.