【城市印象】之——九省通衢 · 武汉City Impressions: Wuhan, the Crossroads of Nine Provinces

Wuhan's drivers are guaranteed to leave an impression.

Politics

Wuhan is the capital of Hubei Province, the only sub-provincial and megacity among the six central provinces.

It's the only place with an area code starting with 02. After the leading 0, China has exactly one long-distance code beginning with 1: Beijing. 010 for the capital, no argument there. The 2-series that follows goes: 020 Guangzhou, 021 Shanghai, 022 Tianjin, 023 Chongqing, 024 Shenyang, 025 Nanjing (026, they say, is reserved for Taiwan), 027 Wuhan, 028 Chengdu, 029 Xi'an. Landing a 2-series long-distance code is a form of national recognition of big-city status.

(Figure in original: a 2015 chart of China's urban hierarchy, the country's top 60 cities.)

As everyone knows, Wuhan towers over the rest of Hubei. But this dominance isn't a thing of recent years, nor of the years since 1949, nor even of the modern era. In The Hankow of Late Imperial China (Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City), by Johns Hopkins history professor William Rowe, we read that even before the treaty port opened in 1860, Hankou was already one of the largest trade centers in China, and Wuchang had served as the seat of the Huguang region for several hundred years. So Wuhan became a provincial capital because it was strong, not the other way around.

In the modern-history textbooks, Wuhan stood shoulder to shoulder with Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. That it's ended up like this — a "tier 1.5" city — can only be called a step backward. No proper big companies to speak of, and next to no name recognition in the red-hot internet sector.

Economy

In 2017, GDP came to 1.191261 trillion yuan, up 7.8% year on year, ranking fourth among the fifteen sub-provincial cities and the only city in central China to break the trillion-yuan mark.

Look through China's provincial GDP totals and rankings since 1952, and Hubei's lowest rank was 13th in 1954; its highest was 7th, in 1962, 1963, 1964, 1966, and 1967.

After that, Hubei's place on the national economic map never touched 7th again. From the start of reform and opening up through 2015, Hubei overtook Hebei only once, in 1986. And after 2003, Sichuan consistently kept it down. In 2009, Hunan even passed Hubei for the first time. Fortunately, by 2012 Hubei had overtaken Hunan again, and has held that position since.

In 2016, China's GDP "trillion-yuan club" grew to twelve cities, which in order are Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Tianjin, Chongqing, Suzhou, Chengdu, Wuhan, Hangzhou, Nanjing, and Qingdao.

Among them, Wuhan first crossed the trillion mark in 2014, and last year marked its third straight year holding a spot in the club — the only central-China city to make it, ranking ninth nationwide by GDP. Among the fifteen sub-provincial cities, Wuhan ranked fourth. And Wuhan contributes more than a third of the whole province's GDP, at 36.88%.

By preliminary calculations, in 2016 Hubei's primary sector added 349.93 billion yuan, up 3.9%; the secondary sector added 1.437513 trillion yuan, up 7.8%; and the tertiary sector added 1.442348 trillion yuan, up 9.5%, or 1.7 percentage points faster than the secondary sector.

In 2016, the tertiary sector's contribution to Hubei's economic growth rose from 47.9% the prior year to 50.7%, 6.8 percentage points higher than the secondary sector's contribution. It was the second straight year the tertiary sector's contribution topped the secondary's, with rapid growth in real estate, for-profit services, and finance deserving much of the credit.

Culture and Customs

Every region's teahouses carry their own cultural flavor. Beijing's has rhythm, Chengdu's is earthy, Hangzhou's refined, Suzhou's clever, Shanghai's cosmopolitan, Guangzhou's about the food — and Wuhan's teahouses are more down-to-earth, richer in the texture of everyday life, with a whiff of smoke and street and a thread of the rough-and-tumble.

Newcomers to Wuhan are usually stunned by the spectacle of Wuhan people eating breakfast: a whole street lined with breakfast stalls, each one mobbed with eaters — one waiting on a bowl of hot dry noodles, another eyeing his mianwo, another cradling a slab of doupi. These signature breakfasts mark the start of Greater Wuhan's day.

Unlike Guangzhou's slow-paced morning tea, Wuhan people usually don't have time to sit down and eat at leisure — they hold it in hand or stuff it in a bag and rush off to work or school. And so the hot dry noodles, the doupi, the mianwo travel with them, weaving through the streets and alleys of Wuhan's three towns.

This is Wuhan's once-a-day citywide ritual, called guozao — "doing breakfast." Someone even joked: even if a downpour turns this city upside down, Wuhan people still have to do breakfast.

Unlike Cantonese dim sum, with its clear categories, Wuhan's guozao spread looks chaotic, with no strict system to it. Sorting it out, Wuhan breakfast breaks roughly into four families:

Noodles and rice-noodles: hot dry noodles, beef noodles, beef rice-noodles, hutang fen (paste noodle soup), doupi shreds.

Fried things: doupi, mianwo, sweet-potato mianwo, qishui baba, pan-fried buns, glutinous rice chicken, huanxituo, youxiang.

Steamed things: shaomai, glutinous rice wrapped around youtiao, soup dumplings.

Drinks: fermented-rice paste, egg wine.

City Development

Wuhan belongs to the "far from the court, out among the rivers and lakes" type of place. It has the vast, misty waters of the Yangtze and lakes wreathed in haze, and yet none of it clashes with its down-market, everyday air.

For this city, water is its soul.

The times have leapt forward, and the water quality has worsened. But there are still people willing to conquer the Yangtze, China's longest waterway. Even in the bone-chilling cold of winter, people take joy in swimming here.

The Yangtze pulls at the arteries of Wuhan's three towns: it links Hanyang, the industrial hub of the post–Opium War Self-Strengthening Movement; it links Hankou, the commercial district the Qing was forced to open as a port; it links Wuchang, where the first shot of the Republic was fired.

Han Street exists because of the Chu River, and the Chu River was dug because of Wanda. The Chu River is a small waterway connecting East Lake and Sha Lake. Today, thanks to the great conglomerate, it glows with the sheen of modern commerce. Everything on Egret Street feels as if it belongs to Wanda.

Wuhan is a "big county town." Some call it "Wuhan's three towns." Its sheer size can flatten Beijing and Shanghai. Wuhan's bigness is really a matter of not sweating the small stuff — casual and free.

Wuhan isn't the core of some cultural circle, drawing the reverence of an entire Cantonese-speaking region the way Guangzhou does; nor is it some rising star pulling in migrants from all over the country the way Shenzhen does. Wuhan was born as "Central China." A prize every strategist fought over, built and razed several times, warred over and reconciled again and again. That jagged tug-of-war brought different people, different tongues and foods, and shaped an indescribable Wuhan feeling.

Wuhan's streets were laid down at will, its buildings a jumble of heights, its road angles a tangle. Some main arteries don't even have traffic lights; cars and non-motorized vehicles mix and flow together, and trolley routes are still kept. Street names are given just as casually, as if no one could be bothered to spend more thought on it. The road beside Hangkong Road (Aviation Road) is called Hangkong Small Road; the road beside Wansongyuan Road is called Wansongyuan Cross Road.

Compared with other big cities:

Wuhan's strengths: relatively low prices, a relatively fast pace of development, a relatively favorable location among inland cities, and a relatively sensible urban layout.

Wuhan's weaknesses: relatively low civic cultivation, the growing pains of playing catch-up on urban construction in recent years, a still-serious "the state advances, the private sector retreats" tilt in the economy, a poor sense of service from local government, weak implementation of well-rounded education, a serious brain drain from its universities, and so on.

Education

Wuhan has two 985 universities and seven 211 universities. It's a major hub of science and education in China; as of 2015 it had 96 higher-education institutions, including seven-school joint programs — second only to Beijing and ranking second nationwide. Its number of national key universities directly under the Ministry of Education ranks third nationwide; the total number of undergraduates and graduate students in the city reached 1.0726 million.

Not only does it rank first among China's fifteen sub-provincial cities, it also surpasses the four directly governed municipalities and national central cities — Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, and Chongqing — and outstrips famous international metropolises like New York, London, Moscow, Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo, ranking first among the world's big cities. Among them, Wuhan University traces its origins to the Ziqiang Institute, which the Huguang Viceroy Zhang Zhidong petitioned the Qing government to establish in 1893, in the late Qing.

One special upshot of Wuhan's abundance of schools is that you can pursue a double degree at another Wuhan university — a real benefit to students.

Transportation

It's called the "crossroads of nine provinces," a name that originally referred to the waterways and land routes. Later, once the Beijing–Hankou Railway opened, rail was added; later still came the expressways. In recent years, once high-speed rail opened, Wuhan's role as a transport hub has grown ever more apparent. The expressways converge here — Shanghai–Chengdu, Beijing–Guangzhou, and Beijing–Hong Kong–Macau.

Here's a chart to make it clearer:

(Figure in original: a map of Wuhan's high-speed rail lines.)

Wuhan's high-speed rail basically links up most of the country's HSR lines, reachable in every direction. This kind of location brings a concentration of goods and people. Add the golden Yangtze waterway and Wuhan Tianhe Airport, and it's all there. Including the planned aviation industrial park in Hannan District and AVIC's airport in Jiangxia District, Wuhan will see further development in general aviation in the future. So in transport terms, it's far more convenient than fellow old transport hubs like Zhengzhou and Changsha.

Small tips:

1. Most Wuhan locals have never been to the Yellow Crane Tower.

2. The drivers of the yellow minibuses must all be retired F1 racers.

3. Wuhan has nearly 20 lakes, the most of any city in the country.

4. There's a bench on the Han River waterfront numbered 5201314 (Chinese texting shorthand for "I'll love you forever").

5. Wu Yi — the "Iron Lady," the only vice-national-level female leader since 1949 never to marry — is from Wuhan.

6. The three Wuhan universities with the most beautiful women are the Wuhan Conservatory of Music, the Central China Normal University School of Journalism and Communication, and the Hubei University of Economics.

7. Wuhan drivers come in four grades: ordinary driver < taxi driver < bus driver < 521 driver.

8. A Wuhan woman might well call her own kid "son of a bitch."

9. Breakfast here is called guozao.

10. This is the only city I've ever seen where you can eat while walking down the street without passersby giving you dirty looks.

The image below counts as a very proper guozao spread:

(Figure in original: a Wuhan guozao breakfast.)

11. The Yellow Crane Tower burned down in 1884. It started with a fire at a workshop outside Hanyang Gate; the blaze was so big it spread to the Yellow Crane Tower, everyone ran over to gawk, and in the end the tower collapsed in flames, taking more than two hundred houses at the foot of the hill with it.

12. After 1949, Wuhan had four universities: Wuhan University, Hubei University, Huazhong Institute of Technology, and Huazhong Agricultural College — "three new and one old." Wuhan University and Hubei University (that is, the Shouyi campus of today's Zhongnan University of Economics and Law) sit within the city.

13. Construction on the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge began in 1955 and finished in 1957; the Second Yangtze River Bridge began in 1991 and finished in 1995. Look at how long apart the two bridges opened, and you'll see the long-distance-relationship joke is one the people of Wuhan's three towns can genuinely keep milking for decades. Also, the Yangtze River Bridge is currently the most durable bridge there is.

14. Wuhan's seven universities each rule their own hill:

Wuhan University — Luojia Hill;

Huazhong University of Science and Technology — Yujia Hill;

China University of Geosciences — Nanwang Hill;

Wuhan University of Technology — Mafang Hill;

Central China Normal University — Guizi Hill;

Zhongnan University of Economics and Law — Pingding Hill;

Huazhong Agricultural University — Shizi Hill.

15. A traffic cop stops a motorcyclist on the waterfront. The rider says, "What're you stopping me for? I'm a Wuhan local." The cop says, "You're no Wuhan local." Rider: "How am I not a Wuhan local?" Cop: "Cut the nonsense — wait till I stop an actual Wuhan local and you'll see." Just then another motorcycle comes roaring up. The cop waves to stop it, and the bike guns it and blows right past, a line trailing back on the wind: "You dumb bitch, come catch me if you can." The cop turns to the first rider: "See that! That's your real Wuhan local!"

In a sentence: Wuhan isn't especially unwelcoming to outsiders, but its reputation isn't great compared with other big cities. Livability, two stars. Economic development, four stars. Career-grind index, three stars.