Wuhan

Wuhan is the capital of Hubei province in central China, where the Han River flows into the Yangtze. It was formed from three older towns on the banks of the two rivers, Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, and its name joins theirs.

Wuchang was a walled town on the south bank by the 3rd century, during the Three Kingdoms period. Hankou grew as a market for the rice, tea and salt carried along the rivers, and from the 1860s foreign concessions lined its bank of the Yangtze. In the 1890s the governor Zhang Zhidong set up the Hanyang Iron Works and new schools that made the region a center of industry. An uprising in Wuchang in 1911 began the revolution that ended the Qing dynasty, and the three towns were joined as one city in the late 1920s.

The Yellow Crane Tower, rebuilt on Snake Hill in the 1980s, is known from a Tang poem by Cui Hao about an immortal who flew away on a crane. The Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, opened in 1957, was the first bridge across the Yangtze, with trains on its lower deck and cars above. The Hubei Provincial Museum shows the bronze bells of Marquis Yi of Zeng, a set of more than 60 bells from a tomb of the 5th century BC. Wuhan University, on the slopes of Luojia Hill beside East Lake, is known for the cherry trees that bloom on its campus every spring.

Dongfeng Motor, based in the city, makes trucks and cars, many of them with partners such as Nissan and Honda. Yangtze Memory Technologies builds flash memory chips at its plant in the east of the city. Yangtze Optical Fibre and Cable, also based in Wuhan, makes optical fiber and the cables that carry it.