Hubei

• 1. Introduction

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  Hubei sits at the heart of China, not on its coasts or in its far west, but dead center in the middle of the country's great river basin. On the 1st of December 2019, a single case of an unusual pneumonia was identified in Wuhan, Hubei's provincial capital. Within weeks, authorities locked down fifteen cities across the province, directly affecting fifty-seven million people. The World Health Organization would eventually call what spread from that single case a global pandemic.

  But long before that moment made Hubei known to the entire world, this province had been at the crossroads of Chinese civilization for more than three thousand years. Its name means "north of the lake" - a reference to Dongting Lake to its south - and water has shaped nearly everything about it. The Yangtze River and its tributary the Han River converge at the center of Wuhan. Thousands of lakes dot the Jianghan Plain, earning Hubei its other name: the Province of Lakes.

  What kind of place produces the spark for a modern pandemic, a centuries-old uprising that ended an imperial dynasty, and some of the most powerful ancient states in Chinese history? What does it take to be the land where China's north meets its south, where the mountains give way to the plains? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The State of Chu

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  By the Spring and Autumn period, roughly 770 to 476 BC, the territory of today's Hubei belonged to a state unlike any other in the Chinese world. Chu was nominally a tributary of the Zhou dynasty, but it grew into something far more powerful and far more culturally distinct than the Zhou ever intended.

  Chu controlled much of the middle and lower Yangtze River, with its reach extending northward into the North China Plain. It was not simply another Zhou state - it was a blend of northern and southern culture, something different from the civilization that had emerged centuries earlier in the north. The Hubei Provincial Museum in Wuhan preserves artifacts of Chu that demonstrate how distinct this culture was from the Shang and Zhou world.

  The end of Chu came through a series of wars with the State of Qin, the rising power to the northwest in what is now Shaanxi. During the Warring States period, which ran from 475 to 221 BC, Qin pressed eastward relentlessly. Chu lost its dominance over the Sichuan Basin first, then its heartland - the territory corresponding to modern Hubei - fell in 278 BC. The remnants of Chu's government fled eastward and were finally extinguished by Qin in 223 BC. Two years later, Qin founded the first unified dynasty in Chinese history.

• 3. Warlords and Water

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  Few places in Chinese history attracted more military attention than the region around present-day Hubei, and the early 3rd century AD shows why. Jingzhou, the Han dynasty province covering today's Hubei and Hunan, became the prize in a contest between three of history's most famous Chinese warlords.

  After the regional ruler Liu Biao died in 208 AD, his successors surrendered his realm to Cao Cao, who had already conquered nearly all of north China. The Battle of Red Cliffs, fought in 208 or 209, changed everything. Warlords Liu Bei and Sun Quan combined forces to drive Cao Cao out of Jingzhou. Liu Bei took the province and appointed Guan Yu as administrator of Xiangyang to guard it - a name still carried by a major Hubei city today. Liu Bei then moved to conquer the Sichuan Basin but lost Jingzhou to Sun Quan; for decades afterward, it was Sun Quan and his Wu Kingdom that held the territory.

  The rivers that made Hubei so worth fighting over also posed constant dangers. The Han and Qing dynasties both maintained elaborate systems of dikes to protect farmland from summer floods. The 1954 Yangtze River Floods struck the province and Wuhan with particular severity. That disaster drove the decision to build the Gezhouba Dam near Yichang, work that began in 1970 and was completed in 1988, followed by the far larger Three Gorges Dam upstream, whose construction started in 1993.

• 4. The Revolution's Birthplace

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  In 1911, a single event in Wuhan changed the course of Chinese history. The Wuchang Uprising, named for the district of modern Wuhan where it began, started the Xinhai Revolution. That revolution overthrew the Qing dynasty and established the Republic of China - ending more than two thousand years of imperial rule.

  The path to that moment had been partly laid in Hubei itself. Zhang Zhidong, who served as Viceroy of Huguang from 1889 to 1907, had transformed the province through modernizing reforms. His efforts made Wuhan a prosperous center of commerce and industry, and the Huangshi and Daye area to Wuhan's southeast became a significant hub of mining and metallurgy.

  The revolutionary tradition of Wuhan continued into the twentieth century, though not always in celebrated ways. In 1927 Wuhan became the seat of a left-wing Kuomintang government led by Wang Jingwei; that government later merged into Chiang Kai-shek's administration in Nanjing. During World War II, Japan occupied the eastern parts of Hubei while western parts remained under Chinese control. Then in July 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, the Wuhan Incident - also called the July 20th Incident - saw two rival Red Guard factions fight for control of the city in open armed conflict. The Wuchang Uprising Memorial in Wuhan still stands as a reminder of where that long chain of upheaval began.

• 5. Water, Power, and Scale

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  Shennong Peak, in the Daba Mountains of the Shennongjia forestry area, rises 3,105 meters - the highest point in Hubei. From that summit, the province stretches out as an illustration of what rivers and mountains can do to a civilization. The west is rugged, cut through by ranges including the Wudang Mountains, the Jing Mountains, the Daba Mountains, and the Wu Mountains. The center and south open into the Jianghan Plain, named for the two rivers that define Hubei: the Yangtze and the Han.

  The eastern half of the Three Gorges - Xiling Gorge and part of Wu Gorge - lies in western Hubei. The Three Gorges Dam at Yichang, completed and fully operational as of 2012, produces an average annual power output of 95 terawatt-hours of hydroelectricity. The dam required resettling millions of people from western Hubei in the years surrounding its construction.

  The province's water management reaches beyond its own borders. On the 18th of October 2009, Chinese authorities began relocating 330,000 residents from Hubei and neighboring Henan to make way for the expanded Danjiangkou Reservoir on the Han River. That reservoir is a key part of the South-North Water Transfer Project, which routes water from the Yangtze basin northward. The largest lake produced by Hubei's many hydrodams, Danjiangkou Reservoir sits on the border between Hubei and Henan, and the province's natural lake system - the thousands of lakes across the Jianghan Plain - includes Liangzi Lake and Hong Lake among its largest.

• 6. Wuhan and the Modern Province

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  Wuhan holds a distinction most cities in the world cannot claim: it has the largest college student population of any city on earth, with 1.3 million students enrolled across its 89 universities. Huazhong University of Science and Technology and Wuhan University sit among the most prominent institutions, and as of 2022, Hubei as a whole hosts 130 institutions of higher education, ranking sixth among Chinese provinces.

  The province's economy spans automotive manufacturing - centered in Shiyan - and optical-electronics, where the Wuhan East Lake High-Tech Development Zone serves as China's largest production center for optical-electronic products. Companies like Changfei Fiber-optical Cables, described as the largest fiber-optical cable maker in China, operate within that zone alongside major telecommunications research institutes. Hubei's nominal GDP was reported at US$787 billion, and its GDP per capita exceeded US$13,000, making it the richest landlocked province in China.

  The railway from Beijing reached Wuhan in 1905 and was eventually extended south to Guangzhou, becoming the first north-to-south rail mainline to cross China. The Wuhan-Guangzhou high-speed railway opened in late 2009 and was later extended to form the Beijing-Guangzhou high-speed railway. Before any of those modern lines existed, the Yangtze and Han rivers were the primary arteries of movement through the province for centuries; the first bridge across the Yangtze in Hubei, the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge, was completed only in 1957.

• 7. Culture and Identity

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  Other Chinese have a saying about the people of Hubei: "In the sky live nine-headed birds. On the earth live Hubei people." The nickname "Nine-headed Birds" comes from a mythological creature said to be very aggressive and hard to kill, and it is not meant as a compliment. That the people of an entire province carry such a distinct reputation tells something about how strongly regional identity registers within China.

  Hubei cuisine rests on freshwater fish above almost everything else. The Wuchang bream, a freshwater fish commonly steamed, is perhaps the most celebrated dish the province claims. The opera traditions of Hanju and Chuju developed here, and the province is thought to be where the card game dou dizhu originated.

  The Shennongjia area carries a different kind of cultural weight: it is the alleged home of the Yeren, a wild undiscovered hominid said to live in the forested hills. Whether or not the Yeren exists, the mountains that supposedly shelter it are real and significant. Mount Wudang in the province's northwest, whose complex of buildings was originally constructed early in the Ming dynasty, has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994. That recognition places Hubei's mountains in the same category as the ancient state of Chu's artifacts in the provincial museum - evidence that the province's identity runs far deeper than its role in recent world events.