Read the city
before you arrive

Start here if you read one novel. It is set during the 1926 siege of Wuchang, when the walled town was cut off and its civilians starved behind the gates. The city is not background: the walls, the Yangtze and the split between the three towns drive the plot. It gives a first-time visitor a sense of Wuchang as an old, enclosed place rather than a district of universities and the tower hill.

The catch: a war novel, not a guidebook, and its 1926 city has almost no physical trace you can visit today. Read it for the mental map, then see the modern town on foot.

Find it: Bookseller record with publication details

The best English eyewitness of wartime Hankou. The two writers spent weeks in the city in 1938, when it was China's capital in all but name — press conferences, air raids, interviews, the strange normality of a city under bombardment. The book mixes Auden's poems, Isherwood's travel diary and Auden's own photographs. It is the closest English text to Act II of the city's story.

The catch: it is a book about a war, not about Wuhan, and out of print — you are hunting a library copy or a second-hand edition. Copyright: a 1939 work; check your local edition's status before copying from it.

Find it: The Morgan Library, 1939 first edition · WorldCat · Open Library

The scholarly standard on the treaty port. Rowe reconstructs the commercial city before the concessions: guilds, tea and salt trades, migration, the street-level institutions that governed a port without much of a state. If you want to understand why Hankou's old streets feel like a merchant city rather than an imperial one, this is the source behind that judgement.

The catch: dense academic history, two volumes, and it stops in the nineteenth century. For a three-day trip it is far more book than you need — browse the first chapters on the port's geography.

Find it: National Library of Australia catalogue · Google Books record

The second half of the same project, on how that commercial society handled conflict, collective organisation and the coming of foreign concessions. Worth knowing the correct subtitle: older summaries sometimes describe this volume as covering "1889–1895", which confuses the first volume's end date with the second's scope. The publisher's own page settles it.

The catch: even more specialised than volume one. Read it only if Rowe's first volume left you wanting the institutional detail.

Find it: Stanford University Press (publisher page)

The novel that made "Hankou-flavour" fiction. A family piled into a tenement by the railway, narrated by a dead child: cramped rooms, ferry crossings, shared stairs, the sense that the city itself is the main character. It is the founding work of Chinese "neo-realism" and the best fictional answer to what the dockside temperament actually felt like indoors.

The catch: a short, bleak book in a bilingual edition from a small press, often hard to find; catalogues disagree about its page count, so do not trust a listing that promises a thick novel. Also: the translator is Herbert J. Batt — Michael Berry translated Wuhan Diary, a different book.

Find it: Library of Congress record · Stanford SearchWorks

The Jiqing Street stories, in English after all. Chi Li writes the small commerce of Hankou — a woman selling duck necks on a night-food street, neighbours, bargaining, dignity — with none of the grand historical sweep. Older English notes claim she is largely untranslated; that is out of date. Her novella appears in this 2012 collection, which is the one to look for.

The catch: it is a mixed-author-style anthology, not a single-novel edition, and second-hand availability is patchy. Do not confuse it with Huo Jianqi's 2002 film Life Show — same source story, different city on screen (see the mix-ups below).

Find it: Internet Archive catalogue

The most available English book about the city, and the most contested. A daily online diary from the 2020 lockdown, translated quickly into English. It tells you a great deal about one writer's experience of those weeks and about how the city's global moment was read abroad.

The catch: it drew fierce criticism inside China, and it is a document of an emergency, not a portrait of ordinary Wuhan. Read it as one contested voice — paired, if you want the sober academic account, with Guobin Yang's The Wuhan Lockdown (Columbia University Press, 2022, below).

Find it: HarperCollins publisher page

The footnote-heavy counterpart to the diary. A sociologist reconstructs the same seventy-six days through digital media, collective memory and civil society. It is the book for readers who want the 2020 chapter argued and sourced rather than lived in real time.

The catch: we could not verify an ISBN or a live publisher page for this title — the obvious Columbia University Press URL returns a 404 and one guessed ISBN turns out to belong to a completely different book. We therefore give no link rather than invent one. Check a library catalogue before ordering.

Find it: search a library catalogue by title and author; no publisher URL we could verify.

The easiest to find outside China, and the most stylised. A wounded gangster and a woman who works the lakeside night economy circle each other through rain, neon and a police dragnet. It is a noir, not a documentary — but the wet streets, the underpasses and the dialect are the city's, not a studio's idea of it. The only Chinese film in the 2019 Cannes competition.

The catch: the plot is deliberately hard to follow and the violence is abrupt. Come for the atmosphere, not for orientation — you will not recognise any landmark.

Find it: Festival de Cannes official film page · IMDb · Douban

The warmest entry point. A funeral director just out of prison and a little girl who refuses to leave him, in the ordinary lanes and shopfronts of Wuhan, with Wuhan-born Zhu Yilong switching between local dialect and accented Mandarin. It was a large domestic hit, and it shows the city the way residents walk it — cluttered, noisy, affectionate.

The catch: a feel-growl crowd-pleaser with a melodramatic third act; the city is a setting, not the subject. Availability outside China varies by region and changes often.

Find it: IMDb · CCTV coverage, June 2022

The highest-density portrait of the dockside temperament. A market porter's widow holds a family together across decades in a cramped flat, in the Wuhan dialect the director insisted on. If you want to hear the city rather than see its landmarks, this is the film. Chinese press at the time reported that the dialogue was entirely in Wuhan speech.

The catch: it was selected as the only Chinese film in the main competition of the 2012 Tokyo International Film Festival, but the producers withdrew it before the festival — so "a Tokyo competition film" is not quite right. It is also a hard watch, and subtitled copies outside China are scarce.

Find it: IMDb · Douban · China News report on the dialect and withdrawal

The earliest moving images of the city at war. Ivens filmed in Hankou in 1938 — the Eighth Route Army office, the city's mass donation campaign, air raids — before going on to the Taierzhuang front. The narration is by Fredric March, the cinematography involves Robert Capa and John Fernhout, and the score is by Hanns Eisler. For a reader of Journey to a War, it is the same weeks in film.

The catch: it is a documentary about a war, not a film about Wuhan, and published running times disagree (52, 56 and 61 minutes all appear). We earlier wrote that it "hangs in MoMA"; the accurate statement is that MoMA has screened it in a collection programme and holds archival material on it. We corrected that here.

Find it: MoMA Doc Month programme (PDF) · MoMA Film Study Center archive list (PDF)

The lockdown, filmed inside four Wuhan hospitals. An observational documentary made as events unfolded, with no voice-over framing the city for outsiders. Its world premiere was at Toronto in September 2020, and it appeared on the Academy's fifteen-film documentary feature shortlist for the 93rd Oscars.

The catch: a shortlist is not a nomination — we say so because databases get this wrong, including an IMDb trivia entry that names the wrong ceremony. And, like the other 2020 works here, it films an emergency rather than the city's ordinary life.

Find it: Official film site · Academy 93rd Oscars shortlists · IMDb

The dramatised counterpart to 76 Days. A large-scale studio production built around the hospital that became the city's best-known 2020 setting, with Zhang Hanyu and Yuan Quan. Where the documentary observes, this one reconstructs and scores — useful precisely as a comparison in how the same weeks get told.

The catch: a state-backed prestige drama with heroic conventions; treat it as a genre piece, not a record. We have not verified its awards line by line, so none are claimed here.

Find it: IMDb

The one that watches the street rather than the ward. An observational film made in the city during the peak of the outbreak, following residents rather than institutions. It premiered at Hot Docs in 2021. Of the 2020 titles, it is the closest to the everyday city this handbook is about.

The catch: difficult to find on general streaming platforms; festival and educational screenings are the usual route. Its distributor makes press images available for web use — which is why this is the one 2020 film where a genuine still could legally appear, though we still choose not to embed one.

Find it: Rotten Tomatoes · The Film Collaborative