3-Day Wuhan: the Tower, the Bells and the Foreign Bund

Morning or midday - arrival
Wuhan is three cities that became one: Wuchang on the south bank, the scholarly one; Hanyang, the industrial one; and Hankou on the north bank, the port the British, Russians, French, Germans and Japanese all carved concessions out of after 1861. Your guide meets you at Tianhe airport or at Wuhan, Wuchang or Hankou railway station - all three are on the metro, and all three are within an hour of the river - and drives you to the Wuchang side, where almost everything in this programme begins.

The Yellow Crane Tower
The tower stands on Snake Hill, and the view from the top is the reason to climb it: the Yangtze, a kilometre and a half of brown water wide here, and the first Yangtze bridge, built with Soviet help between 1955 and 1957, running straight out from the foot of the hill. The building itself is a 1985 reconstruction in reinforced concrete, moved about a kilometre from the original site when the bridge took the old one, and it follows the Qing form rather than any earlier one. What survives from the older towers is the poetry. Cui Hao's seventh-century lines about the yellow crane that left and never came back are the reason the place has its name, and Li Bai came here and famously declined to write, saying Cui Hao had already done it better. Your guide reads them in translation on the terrace and then leaves you to look at the river, which is the real exhibit.

Lunch
Wuhan eats breakfast more seriously than most cities eat dinner, and hot dry noodles - re gan mian - are the reason. Sesame paste, pickled radish, scallion, a little chilli oil, and noodles that have been parboiled, oiled and cooled so they stay springy. Your first meal is a small one: hot dry noodles, a bowl of sweet rice wine with egg, and a plate of sanxian doupi, the fried rectangle of rice, egg, mushroom and pork that is the other Wuhan breakfast. A mild version is ordered alongside for anyone who wants it.

Afternoon - Hubu Alley and the riverbank
Hubu Alley runs down the hill from the tower and has been a food street since the Ming, when it served the provincial administration offices that stood here. It is touristy and worth twenty minutes: the alley is narrow, the stalls are loud, and the food is real enough that locals still come for the grilled squid and the fried lotus root. From the bottom of the alley you are on the riverbank, and the walk north along it gives you the bridge from underneath and the ferries crossing to Hankou.

Evening
Dinner near the hotel. If the group has the energy and the season is right, the night market on Jiqing Street is the place for crayfish in oil and chilli, which Wuhan eats in quantities that are hard to credit between May and September.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuchang or riverside, Wuhan.

Morning - Hubei Provincial Museum
The museum sits beside East Lake in Wuchang and it is free, which means it is also crowded: entry is by timed reservation and your guide holds it in advance, usually for the first slot of the day. The building you want is the one housing the finds from the tomb of Marquis Yi of Zeng, excavated at Leigudun near Suizhou in 1978. The marquis died around 433 BC and was buried with 65 bronze bells hung on a wooden frame, each of them tuned to two notes, together with the inscription that records the pitch names in use at the time.

The bells were cast with a precision that still works: they were played after excavation, and recordings exist, and the museum has them under glass with the rack reconstructed at full height. Around them are the rest of the grave - bronze vessels weighing hundreds of kilograms, the marquis's coffin set inside a larger outer one, and a gold vessel with a lid. The other half of the collection is Chu: lacquer from the southern state that dominated the middle Yangtze for eight centuries, silk, and the jade and bronze of a culture whose art is stranger and more writhing than anything coming out of the north at the same moment. Allow two and a half hours, and accept that the chime-bell hall gets loud.

Lunch
Hubei is a province of lakes and rivers and the cooking follows: lotus root in soup, steamed Wuchang fish, and the braised pork rib and lotus root stew that appears on every table in Wuhan in autumn. Your guide orders a spread that is heavy on fish and light on chilli, with a separate plate of something unspiced for anyone who needs it.

Afternoon - East Lake
East Lake covers about 33 square kilometres and is the largest urban lake in China by water area. The part worth your afternoon is the south shore: the greenway that runs under the old plane trees to Moshui Lake, the causeways, and the lotus beds that are at their best in July and August. You take a boat across rather than driving around, which is both quicker and the reason people come. On the far side, the Hubei Museum of Fine Arts and the sculpture park are optional and usually skipped.

Evening
Dinner in Wuchang. If the season is right - late March into early April - Wuhan University's cherry avenue is ten minutes from the lake and worth an hour of daylight; your guide will tell you whether the trees are out and whether the campus is open to visitors that week.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuchang or riverside, Wuhan.

Morning - the former concessions
After the Second Opium War, Hankou was opened as a treaty port, and by the 1900s the riverfront here was run by five separate foreign administrations with their own police, their own tram lines and their own building codes. The architecture is still standing. Along Yanjiang Avenue you get the Russian and French trading houses, the German consulate, and the block-long British municipal buildings, all in a grey brick and stone that has weathered badly in a good way. Your guide walks the riverfront first for the plan of it - concessions laid out perpendicular to the river, each with its own bund - and then goes inland to the side streets where the interiors have been turned into cafes and small shops without the facades being touched.

The Customs House
The Jianghan Customs House of 1924 is the building that dominates the bund, with a clock tower that still keeps time and bells that are rung on the hour. It is a museum now, and the collection is mostly documentary: the trade ledgers, the river charts, and the photographs of the bund under foreign management. Half an hour is enough, and the view from the upper floor over the river and the confluence with the Han is the reason to go up.

Lunch
In the concessions: the area is full of small restaurants in old buildings, and your guide picks one for a Hubei table - fish balls from Jingzhou, dried bean curd, and the steamed dishes that the province does better than anywhere, mianyang san zheng, three things steamed together in one steamer.

Afternoon - the 1911 Revolution
On 10 October 1911 a bomb being assembled in the Russian concession exploded early, the police raided, found the membership lists of the revolutionary cell, and the mutiny that followed began not as a plan but as a way out of being arrested. By the following morning Wuchang was in rebel hands, and within two months the Qing had gone. The museum on the Wuchang side covers it with documents rather than dioramas, and the red-brick parliament building next door - the "red house" - is where the provisional government sat. Across the street, the bronze of Sun Yat-sen faces the square. Your guide runs the sequence in the order it happened, which makes the accident of it much clearer than any summary does.

Evening
Jiqing Street or the Hankou riverfront for dinner; the night market here is older and less polished than the one in Wuchang, and the crayfish and the grilled fish are the same.

Meals
Lunch, Dinner

Accommodation
Wuchang or riverside, Wuhan.

Your guide and driver take you to Tianhe airport or to the railway station, timed to your departure. Wuhan sits at the centre of the country's high-speed network: Beijing West in about four and a half hours, Shanghai Hongqiao in four to five, Guangzhou South in about four, Xi'an North in about four and a half, and Chengdu or Chongqing in six to seven. If you have a late flight and want the morning, ask your guide the night before and they will add a market or the provincial museum; the museum needs a reservation and cannot be arranged on the day.

Meals
Breakfast at the hotel

Accommodation
Not included