The names the city
uses for itself

A city’s nicknames are a compressed argument about what it thinks it is. Wuhan’s are unusually useful, because three of them are about infrastructure and one is about weather — and one of them is not really Wuhan’s at all.

River City 江城

The oldest and least contested of the names, and the one that is simply true: a city built at the meeting of two rivers, whose shape, trade and disasters all follow from water. It is used in poetry, in newspaper titles and on municipal signage, and unlike the other names on this page nobody argues about it. If you only learn one, learn this one — it is what a local means if they call the place jiangcheng rather than Wuhan, and it will make the geography of the rest of your trip legible. See the two rivers.

Nine Provinces’ Thoroughfare 九省通衢

A claim about transport, and through transport about power. The phrase says that from here you can reach nine provinces, which in practice meant that goods and troops moving between north, south, east and west China passed through this point on the Yangtze. It is not a measurement and the number nine is rhetorical rather than counted — the useful content is that Wuhan’s importance has always been positional rather than productive. That is still the argument made about the city today, and the reason its rail and river infrastructure is discussed in national terms. See the train stations.

Chicago of the East 东方芝加哥

The label English-language writing loves and the city does not use. It is usually attributed to Sun Yat-sen, and the attribution is wrong in a specific way worth knowing: what he actually wrote, after visiting in 1912, was that Wuhan’s future would be on the scale of New York and London — a comparison to size, not to Chicago’s industry. The Chicago version seems to have been produced later by foreign observers noticing the river, the rail and the steel. It is a reasonable observation and a bad citation. See the 1911 page for the full correction.

Furnace 火炉

A folk label for the summer heat, shared with a handful of other Chinese cities and not an official title anyone awards. The word describes a lived experience — humid heat that does not drop at night — rather than a climate statistic, and it is worth keeping the two apart: the city’s actual monthly figures are on the weather page, which uses a thirty-year official average, and those numbers do not make the case as dramatically as the nickname does. Treat huolu as a local complaint you are welcome to join in with, not as a measurement.

Lifen 里份

The alley-house form of old Hankou: rows of two- or three-storey terraced dwellings entered from a shared lane, built in the concession period and in the decades after, dense and narrow and designed around communal space rather than private frontage. It is the Hankou equivalent of Beijing’s hutongs or Shanghai’s lilong, and like both it has been largely demolished. What survives is patchy and often in poor repair. You will see the word on street signs and in the names of renovated commercial projects, where it usually signals that something old was removed and the name kept.

Wharf culture 码头文化

An explanation locals give for their own manners: that a river port built on loading and unloading produces people who are direct, fast, impatient with formality, and used to dealing with strangers. It is offered as a compliment and sometimes as an excuse. Handle it carefully — it is a self-description rather than a finding, there is no way to test it, and it can shade into the same essentialism that makes every city claim to have the warmest, bluntest people in the country. What can be said is that the city grew around hauling, and that its older commercial streets still show it. See what Wuhan is.

The Hankou concessions 汉口租界

Several foreign administrations carved out of the Hankou riverfront from the mid-nineteenth century, among them the British, Russian, French, German and Japanese, each with its own police, taxation and building rules. The consequence you can still walk through is architectural: banks, customs houses, churches and villas built to foreign specifications in a compact riverside strip, which is why that bank looks nothing like the rest of the city. The concessions were returned in stages and the last were formally abolished during the Second World War. See Hankou.

Hanyang Arsenal 汉阳造

A rifle, and the factory that made it, and now a name for a design district built on the site. The arsenal was one of the industrial works founded in Hanyang in the late Qing self-strengthening period, and its rifle became so standard that “Hanyang made” was for decades a way of naming a weapon rather than a place. It is the clearest case in Wuhan of a factory name outliving the factory, and it is the reason Hanyang’s industrial history is older than the steelworks that people usually mean. See Hanyang and the history page.

How to use these

Three of these words are safe to repeat: River City, the concessions, and lifen. One should be repeated with a correction attached: Chicago of the East. One is a mood rather than a fact: the Furnace. One is a claim to treat skeptically: Nine Provinces’ Thoroughfare. And one — wharf culture — is best understood as the story Wuhan tells about itself, which is interesting in its own right even if it cannot be verified.

For the words you will hear on the street rather than read in a guide, see the dialect page. For places, the place-name list. For food, the food words.