Wuchang Old Town

Wuchang is the historical southern half of Wuhan, separated from Hankou and Hanyang by the Yangtze and Han rivers. The 1911 Wuchang Uprising — the military mutiny that ended the Qing dynasty within months — began in the army barracks at Wuchang Hong Shan, and the surrounding district preserves substantial monuments to the Republican Revolution.

Yellow Crane Tower (Huanghe Lou), perched on Snake Hill above the southern end of the Yangtze River Bridge, is the most famous landmark in central China. The tower has been destroyed and rebuilt at least a dozen times since its Three Kingdoms-era founding; the current 1985 reconstruction in Tang-revival style is concrete-and-steel beneath traditional cladding. The tower's significance is literary as much as architectural — Tang and Song poetry built it into the canonical Chinese landscape vocabulary.

Wuhan University's Luojiashan campus, on the lake-edge between Wuchang and East Lake, is one of China's most architecturally substantial university campuses — a 1930s concentration of Chinese-revival academic buildings around the Luojiashan main library, with the cherry-blossom avenue (a 1940s gift from the Japanese occupation forces) drawing photography-tour crowds in late March.

The Hubei Provincial Museum, on the eastern shore of East Lake, contains the most important single set of artefacts in Hubei: the 64 bronze bells (bianzhong) from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng (433 BCE), one of the largest and most musically-precise sets of bronze instruments from the ancient world. The museum is free entry but requires advance reservation.