Wuhan, China
I’ve arrived in Wuhan, China!
On arrival I was greeted by Rita, one of TDM’s teacher assistants, and taken to my apartment in Wuchang. It’s a lovely apartment on the 23rd floor with great views of Wuchang. I’m sharing with an American man, Jim, and a Filipino woman, Babylyn.
Wuhan itself is quite modern compared to what I expected. Reminds me a lot of Melbourne. In fact, I think I’m simultaneously experiencing culture shock and reverse culture shock at the moment. It’s strange to see real roads and real footpaths and real skyscrapers again. Sometimes I forget I’m in China, and then I speak to someone and realise they only speak Chinese. It’s weird that I spent three months in a developing country where everyone spoke English and then headed to a fast-developing economy in transition where nobody really speaks English.
Wuchang is the oldest of the three formerly independent cities that now make up Wuhan. The earliest settlement in the area was during the Xi (Western) Zhou period (1046–771 BCE). Wuchang was, at times, the capital of the Wu (or Eastern Wu) dynasty during the period of the Three Kingdoms (Sanguo). The Three Kingdoms period, between 220 and 280 CE, was one of the bloodiest periods in China’s history and has been romanticised in the cultures of China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam. At one point, the Wu dynasty had control over most of the east of China and parts of Vietnam. More recently, the Chinese Revolution of 1911–12, which toppled the Qing (Manchu) dynasty (the last of the Chinese dynasties) and established the Republic of China, broke out in the army barracks at Wuchang in what is now known as the Wuchang uprising. Wuchang now serves as the administrative and cultural centre of Wuhan city and Hubei province.
The other two cities that formed to create Wuhan are Hanyang and Hankou. Hanyang was founded during the Sui dynasty (581–618 CE). Hankou (then known as Xiakou) became known during the Song dynasty (960–1279) as one of China’s four major commercial cities and was at the forefront of the general strike of 1923, China’s first large-scale worker industrial action.
In 1926, the Northern Expedition reached the Wuhan area and decided to merge Hankou, Wuchang and Hanyang into one city in order to make a new capital for Nationalist China. The Northern Expedition was a military campaign by the National Revolutionary Army (NRA) of the Kuomintang (KMT) or Chinese Nationalist Party. It was designed to reunify China. Under the left wing of the Kuomintang, Wuhan briefly became the capital of China in 1927.
In 1931, it was the refuge point for people impacted by the 1931 Chinese floods until a dyke failure flooded the city in July and rendered 780,000 people homeless.
During the Japanese invasion in 1937, the Chinese government withdrew to Hankou and temporarily made it the base for Chinese resistance. It eventually fell to the Japanese in 1938 and was occupied by the Japanese until 1945. Wuhan was taken by the Chinese communist forces in 1949.
Modern Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province in the People’s Republic of China. It is the largest city in Hubei and the most populous city in Central China, with a population of over eleven million, the ninth-most populous Chinese city and one of the nine National Central Cities of China. It is dominated by industrial and manufacturing industries and is the home of Wuhan University, making the city popular with university-aged students.
