HUBEI is Han China’s agricultural and geographic centre, mild in climate and well watered. Until 280 BC this was the independent state of Chu, whose sophisticated bronzeworking skills continue to astound archeologists, but for ne last half-millennium the province’s eastern bulk, defined by the low-lying Jianghan plain and spliced by waterways draining into the Yangzi and Han rivers, has become an intensely cultivated maze of rice fields, so rich that (according to tradition) they alone are enough to supply the national need. More recently, Hubei’s central location and mass of transport links by rail, road andriver into neighbouring regions saw the province becoming the first in the interior to be heavily industrialized. Once the colossal Three Gorges hydroelectric dam upstream from Yichang is completed as planned car manufacturing - already up and running with the help of foreign investment and long-established iron and steel plants, will provide a huge source ofincome for central China.

As the”Gateway to Nine Provinces”, skirted by mountains and midway along theYangzi between Shanghai and Chongqing, Hubei has always been of great strategic importance, and somewhere that seditious ideas could easily spread to the rest of the country.

The central regions upriver from the capital, Wuhan, feature prominently in the legends of the Three Kingdoms , with the ports of Jingzhou and Chibi retaining their period associations, while Wuhan itself thrives on industry and river trade, and played a key role in China’s early twentieth-century revolutions. In the west, the ranges that border Sichuan contain the holy peak of Wudang Shan alive with Taoist tem- ples and martial-arts lore, and the remote and little-visited Shennongjia Forest Reserve, said to be inhabited by China’s yeti.