Wuhan on screen:
the streets that play themselves

This is not a celebrity-trail page and we are not going to pretend it is one. It is a page about a specific thing that happened to a specific set of streets: a working residential district with intact 1900s architecture became the standing backlot for Chinese film and television, and then a national broadcast made the same streets a tourist destination.

What happened, in order

Hankou's old concession district was never demolished the way comparable districts in other Chinese cities were, mostly because it stayed dense and lived-in. By the 2010s that made it cheap and convincing to shoot in. Crews came for the red brick frontage, the narrow lanes and — the thing directors actually mention — the fact that ordinary life continues in front of the camera, which is hard to fake.

Then in early 2025 the city hosted one of the regional segments of the CCTV Spring Festival Gala, the most-watched broadcast of the year. Wuhan's segment ran six and a half minutes and used more than twenty locations across the city — the drum formation at the Yellow Crane Tower, the plaza in Optics Valley, the river, and the old streets. Filming took over twenty days. Local reporting is explicit that it was the most locations any host city had used.

What followed is predictable and worth knowing before you arrive: the streets that appeared on screen now have queues at the doorways that appeared on screen. You are not discovering something. You are visiting a place that became famous eighteen months ago.

The route, and what was shot where

Everything below is on the Hankou bank, within walking distance of each other, and free.

Elsewhere in the city, the two locations worth naming are the Yellow Crane Tower (the gala's drum sequence) and the riverside at Jianghanguan, both of which you were probably going to see anyway.

An honest half-day

Start at Jianghanguan on the river, walk inland to Lihuangpi Road, loop through the Bagong building corner and Xian'anfang, then follow Shengli Street east toward Shanhaiguan Road — which puts you at the best breakfast street in the city if you do this in the morning, or at the beer street if you do it in the evening. That is the whole route, and it takes two to three hours without sitting down.

The gala segment's length, location count and filming schedule, and the list of productions shot in the district, come from municipal and provincial press reporting (F141), not from studio publicity. The street lengths and building dates are F131–F132. District framing and the walking order are editorial. Class C — the streets do not move, but which productions used them keeps changing, and the street renovation is an open variable.