A trip to Wuhan

Last weekend I took a trip to Wuhan.

I had never been before, but Wuhan is in fact one of China's most important cities, both currently and historically. It has become the commercial and educational hub of Central China; it is also the city with the largest number of university students in the world, with over a million students spread out over its dozens of universities. 

The high-speed train network has made it much more convenient to take short city breaks across China. The fastest line now does the Beijing-Wuhan route in just four hours, amazingly little time given the huge distance involved. There is just one stop on the way, in Zhengzhou. The price, around 600 Yuan for a ticket, is not particularly cheap but still cheaper than flying. 

Unfortunately, I and the friend I was travelling with set off on a day when much of China was blanketed in thick air pollution. It was heavily polluted all the way from Beijing to Wuhan, to the extent that you could barely see anything out of the train windows. Air pollution is common in China, but it rarely covers such a huge swathe of the country in one go.

The view from my hotel window on the first day I arrived (above), and two days later (below)

     

The hotel where we stayed was excellently located next to the Hankou Bund, China's best-preserved colonial-era Bund (or waterfront) after the Shanghai Bund. Wuhan is traversed by the Yangtze River, and in the 19th century it became one of the so-called "treaty ports" that were forcibly opened up to foreign trade by the European powers. At the time it was made up of three cities, Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, which were later merged to form Wuhan. Five foreign concessions, run by the UK, France, Germany, Russia and Japan and not subjected to Chinese laws, were established next to the Yangtze in Hankou, to the great displeasure of the Qing Dynasty's rulers who could do nothing about it.

The Bund has now become Wuhan's trendiest area, with cafes and nightclubs nestled among the 19th century European buildings and churches that are in many cases still intact. The German and Japanese concessions have mostly been built over, but the British, French and Russian areas are quite well preserved. Although Wuhan has a history that predates the European concessions by centuries and centuries, the European buildings remain the oldest architecture you are likely to see in the city. 

A street in the former German concession

After unpacking we went for a walk in the area, in spite of the pollution, and ate some 热干面 (hot dry noodles), the local specialty, at a hole-in-the-wall restaurant. It tasted excellent. In the evening we headed across town to Wuhan Prison, a well-known bar where punk bands sometimes play live music. When we got there a DJ was performing. The bar is tiny, and it has the sort of grungy atmosphere that you rarely find nowadays in Beijing, with young foreigners and Chinese hanging out together. 

We barely saw any other foreign faces in Wuhan except for the ones in that bar, by the way. The city used to have quite a lot of foreign students, but most were evacuated or left after Covid began, and few have returned.

In the bar I got chatting to a young Moroccan man doing postgraduate studies in one of Wuhan's universities. He was one of those who didn't leave when Covid started. A sociable and multilingual young man, he told me how he had been lucky during the Zero Covid years because he lived off campus. Foreign students living on campuses throughout China were notoriously badly treated over that time, often entirely forbidden from leaving their campuses even when cities were not in lockdown.

He said that his university had long tried to push him to move to a dorm on campus, so they could control his movements, but he had found ways to refuse. When they summoned him to the campus, he would claim that he was in lockdown and had been told not to leave his house. On one occasion he left Wuhan, and got a call from the university telling him that he wasn't allowed to leave the city and should return at once. He told them that if they bought him a return ticket with their money, he would go back. They then relented.

The view from the top of the Yellow Crane Tower

The following day strong winds arrived and blew away the pollution, but the weather suddenly turned very cold, almost as cold as Beijing. Luckily our hotel room was well heated, but central heating isn't common in southern Chinese cities like Wuhan, and restaurants and other indoor environments could often be quite chilly.

After having lunch we decided to cross the 武汉长江大桥, the city's largest bridge over the Yangtze, on foot. The Yangtze is an enormous river, and it took about fifteen minutes to cross the bridge, which turned out to be quite painful in the Arctic winds. Wuhan's skyline seen from the middle of the Yangtze could rival Manhattan's, with skyscraper after skyscraper jostling for space. 

Once across the river we walked on to the Yellow Crane Tower, one of Wuhan's landmarks, made famous by being immortalised in the verses of various poets, including the celebrated Li Bai. The tower has existed since the second century CE in one form or another but, typically for China, the current tower was rebuilt recently, in 1981. It had plenty of visitors, and the view of the city from the top was quite impressive.

That evening it snowed, and the following morning the city was covered in snow. We decided to visit the museum of the Wuchang Uprising. The uprising, which as the name suggests started in Wuchang, one of the three cities that went on to make up Wuhan, marked the beginning of the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, which overthrew the Qing Dynasty and established the Republic of China. 

The museum is housed in a big modernist building, in front of a large square with a monument to the revolution. Between the snowy weather, the "socialist realist" style of the building and the huge empty square with the revolutionary monument, for a moment I felt like I was in Russia. 

On the other side of the square there is an old, European-style building built in 1909 to house Hubei's provincial assembly. After the revolution, the new government used it as its headquarters. It's now been turned into a sort of second museum, with displays on the revolution and what Wuhan was like at the time. Entry to both the building and the museum was free. 

The building that housed the revolutionary government, built in 1909

Some of the exhibits were quite interesting, and gave you a good picture of Wuhan in the dying days of the Qing Dynasty and the early days of the Republic. Political propaganda was never completely absent, of course, with the revolution often described as being a milestone on the path towards the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation", a slogan used a lot in recent years.

The Communist Party's official historiography considers the Xinhai Revolution to have been a positive event, the first step towards the real Revolution of 1949, even though it was led by its arch-rival KMT. Sun Yat-Sen, who led the revolution and founded the KMT, is still lionised in official propaganda, and in fact there was a statue of him outside the museum. This is in contrast to Chiang Kai-Shek, his successor as KMT leader who fought against Mao and then fled to Taiwan, who is reviled. 

The flag on the left was the official flag of the Wuchang Uprising. The 18 yellow dots symbolised China's 18 provinces, and the red and black symbolised blood and steel. The flag on the right, much better known, was the first national flag of the Republic of China. The five colours symbolised the country's five peoples (Han, Manchu, Tibetans, Hui and Mongols) 

The following morning, the weather had gotten warmer and sunnier. We were in Wuhan for four days, and the weather was quite different on each of them. I guess this proves the truth in the city's slogan (武汉，每天不一样, or "every day is different in Wuhan").

We still had a few hours to kill before taking the train back to Beijing, so we decided to go and take a look at the Huanan Seafood Market, the one where the Covid pandemic may have begun. We took a taxi to the neighbourhood, which is actually quite central and only took 20 minutes to reach from our hotel. 

The market turned out to be a nondescript two-storey building next to an intersection, dwarfed by the high-rises around it. Until January 2020, the ground floor of the building contained the seafood and wildlife market which was the epicentre of the world's first Covid outbreak; the second floor housed an eyeglasses market.

It turned out, unsurprisingly, that the seafood and wildlife market on the ground floor is now closed, probably for good. A blue metal barrier has been erected around it, so you can't see inside. There is, of course, no sign or reminder of any kind that this is the place where a pandemic that changed the world forever may have begun. The market is now just an anonymous building in an anonymous suburb with a metal barrier around it. 

On the second floor of the building, however, the eyeglasses market is still open and running. The building has a side entrance sitting next to a row of little shopts, through which you can reach the second floor. We decided to go in. There was a security guard at the entrance, but he didn't stop us. The second floor looked just like any cheap market anywhere in China, with dozens of little shops and stalls selling eyeglasses and competing for customers. It wasn't particularly busy. We walked around a bit, but at some point two security guards started following us. I became rather concerned at this point, and we decided to walk straight back out. 

I am certain that, in spite of the appearance of normality, the site is still considered sensitive, and the security guards have been warned to follow any foreigners who walk in. After all we might have been foreign journalists, there to report from "the place where Covid started". I was concerned enough that I insisted we walk away from the market and round a corner before calling a taxi, rather than hanging around in front of it.

The Huanan Seafood Market is the two-storey building in the centre of the photo

The Chinese authorities indicated the Huanan Seafood Market as the origin of the first cluster of Covid cases in January 2020. A few months later, however, they decided that no one knew where the Covid pandemic had begun, and actually it probably didn't even start in China. Unsurprisingly, the idea that the virus might have arisen at that market is no longer heard much in China today.

The entry on the Huanan Seafood Market in 百度百科, an attempt by Baidu to produce a Chinese Wikipedia, claims that researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences found in February 2020 that Covid did not originate at the market, but was brought there from elsewhere. It then claims that in March 2021, the WHO's report on the origins of Covid found that the market was not the point of origin of the virus, and that it is unclear how the virus got there. The entry then goes on to repeat the theory, often heard in China but not generally taken seriously anywhere else, that the virus could have first been brought to Wuhan from abroad on the packaging of a frozen product, and it reminds us that the Huanan market's supply chain included frozen and animal products from 20 countries.

The truth is that, regardless of what Baidu may claim, the WHO report never said that the market was definitely not Covid's point of origin. In fact, the report (which can easily be downloaded) states in its introduction that it is impossible to say: "No firm conclusion therefore about the role of the Huanan market in the origin of the outbreak, or how the infection was introduced into the market, can currently be drawn". The report, it bears mentioning, was based partly on a visit to Wuhan by a team of WHO experts who were not allowed to go anywhere on their own.

In reality, outside of China the theory that Covid originated in the Huanan Seafood Market remains the most popular one with serious researchers. In July last year, two peer-reviewed papers by an international team of scientists offered strong evidence suggesting that the virus was, indeed, first transmitted to humans from one of the wild animals at the market.

This theory should be far less politically controversial than the most popular alternative, in other words that Covid originated from a lab leak. Even so, the Chinese authorities do not want to hear of it. That's why it wasn't surprising to see that the Huanan Seafood Market remains standing, with nothing to suggest anything particular ever took place there; the seafood and wildlife market shut down as an embarrassment, but the eyeglasses market on the second floor still functioning as normal. 

After leaving the market we went back to our hotel, picked up our stuff and headed to the train station to take the high-speed train back to Beijing. Wuhan had definitely been worth the visit.