Hefei

Hefei is the capital of Anhui province in eastern China, between the Yangtze and Huai rivers on the northern shore of Chao Lake. Bao Zheng, the Song dynasty magistrate remembered in Chinese opera as Judge Bao for his honesty, was born in the city.

Hefei was a walled county town for most of its history, on the routes between the Yangtze valley and the northern plains. Li Hongzhang, the statesman who led the modernization of Qing industry and diplomacy in the 19th century, came from the city, and his family house in the center is kept as a museum. The town was made the capital of Anhui in 1952 and grew rapidly with new factories and schools. In 1970 the University of Science and Technology of China moved to Hefei from Beijing and turned it into a city of science. In the 2010s funds backed by the city government invested in makers of display panels, chips and electric cars, which then built large plants in Hefei.

JAC Motors, based in Hefei, builds trucks, buses and cars, and NIO makes its electric cars in a plant in the city. iFlytek was founded by students of the university and develops software for speech recognition. BOE runs factories in Hefei that make display panels for televisions and computers.

The Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak, called EAST, tests ways of producing energy by nuclear fusion. Baogong Park, along the old city moat, holds a temple to Bao Zheng with a bronze statue of the judge in his robes. The Anhui Museum shows bronzes, Huizhou wood carvings and the inkstones and brushes for which the province is known. Chao Lake, south of the city, is ringed with parks and wetlands along its northern shore.