The currents of history often lay the groundwork for a city’s rise in unforeseen ways. In 1369, the second year of the Hongwu reign, the newly enthroned Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang initiated a massive military recruitment in the Huguang region (modern-day Hubei and Hunan provinces) to quell the Ming Xia regime in Sichuan. Two years later, generals Tang He and Fu Youde led this army west, pacifying the region. While the campaigns concluded, a wave of migration had just begun. This grand demographic shift, later known as the “Lianghu Tian Chuan” (the filling of Sichuan by people from the two lake provinces), inadvertently injected the most primal life force into what would become a great commercial metropolis.
At that time, the place later known as Hankou was nothing more than a desolate floodplain at the confluence of the Han and Yangtze rivers, a “shore of reeds, where fish leaped and wild ducks flew.” It did not even have a name. To encourage the cultivation of the Jingchu region, the government issued a highly attractive decree: “Whoever can reclaim the land may claim it as their own property, forever exempt from taxation.” This edict acted as a magnet, drawing countless military households, farmers, and vagrants displaced by war. They left their ancestral homes and converged on this land, bringing with them different dialects, customs, and a shared desire for survival. They could not have predicted that the ground beneath their feet would, over the next few centuries, become the very heart driving commerce in China’s hinterland. They were no longer people of Jiangxi, Anhui, or Hunan; they now shared a new, common identity—the people of Hankou.
A city’s destiny is often intertwined with the pulse of its rivers. Around the Chenghua era of the Ming Dynasty (c. 1465–1487), the wild and untamed Han River completed its last major recorded change of course, shifting its mouth from the south of Hanyang city to the north of Turtle Hill. This act of nature’s grand power unintentionally created an unparalleled geographical advantage for Hankou. The new estuary was wide and deep, forming a natural, sheltered harbor that provided an ideal anchorage for vessels traveling from north to south. This geographical stability set the stage for commercial congregation.
By the mid-Ming Dynasty, the empire was ushering in its first golden age of commodity economy. The government gradually relaxed its strict economic controls, and industries like salt and iron, once state monopolies, were progressively opened to private capital. Compared to the exorbitant taxes of the Yuan Dynasty, the overall tax burden of the Ming was relatively low, greatly stimulating private commercial vitality. It was against this backdrop that a formidable merchant class began to rise. Bound by regional ties, they formed powerful merchant groups, with the Huizhou and Shanxi merchants being the most prominent.
These “long-distance” merchants, like the capillaries of the empire, connected the resources and markets of various regions. To improve efficiency, they even financed the construction of bridges and roads and skillfully utilized the official post-station system. The boom in commerce gave rise to a cultural product: detailed “commercial route books” became an essential guide for merchants navigating the country.
Hankou was thrust into the center of this commercial tide. It was no longer just a settlement but, by virtue of its geographical endowment as the “thoroughfare of nine provinces,” became an irreplaceable hub for goods distribution. The Yangtze River, a golden waterway, opened up the main east-west trade artery, while the Han River connected the northern and southern inland provinces like Shaanxi and Henan. Water transport was far cheaper and could carry several times more cargo than land transport, making Hankou an ideal logistics hub.
The forest of masts from merchant ships, bustling day and night, gave birth to Hankou’s earliest commercial streets. Boatmen and traders built simple houses and shops along the docks, which gradually formed a street along the river—Hejie (River Street). As commercial activities flourished, Hejie extended inland, eventually evolving into the world-renowned Hanzheng Street. This street became the first witness to Hankou’s commercial prosperity. Goods from all over the country converged here: medicinal herbs from Sichuan, grain from Huguang, silk from Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and furs from Shaanxi. A common saying, “Goods come alive in Hankou,” captured the city’s central role in the national commodity circulation network. Hankou rapidly transformed from a melting pot of sojourners into a major commercial town where Chinese and foreign influences met, earning it the title of one of the “Four Great Commercial Centers of the Realm,” alongside Beijing, Suzhou, and Foshan. The tripartite layout of Wuhan’s three towns—Wuchang, Hanyang, and Hankou—was thus formally established.
However, beneath the prosperity, a crisis was brewing. The Ming Dynasty’s fiscal system began to face severe challenges in its later years. The official “Da Ming Baochao” paper currency had long been rendered worthless by rampant over-issuance and counterfeiting, leading to a collapse of public credit. To address this crisis, the statesman Zhang Juzheng implemented the famous “Single Whip Reform.” Its core principle was to consolidate all land taxes, corvée labor, and miscellaneous levies into a single payment made in silver. While this reform simplified the tax system and increased fiscal revenue in the short term, it shackled the empire’s economic fate to the precious metal. China itself was not a major silver producer, which was tantamount to ceding monetary control to the overseas world, particularly the Americas and Japan, which had vast silver mines. When global silver flows fluctuated, the empire’s economy would suffer violent shocks, sowing the seeds for its later decline.
Almost concurrently, the first rays of globalization began to shine on the eastern coastline. In the second half of the 16th century, Portuguese merchants established a base in Macao, and the Dutch occupied Taiwan, opening direct trade with China. Although the Ming Dynasty enforced maritime bans for most of its reign, smuggling along the southeastern coast was rampant. Silver, spices, silk, and porcelain flowed through various channels, both overt and covert, across these vast waters.
For Hankou, situated deep in the hinterland, the impact of this early global trade was indirect yet profound. The camel bells of Russian caravans brought new business opportunities. These merchants from the north traveled along the long “Tea Road,” deep into the Huguang region, with a single objective: to purchase tea. They especially favored the mellow flavor of Huguang black tea and were willing to pay high prices for it. Hankou, with its convenient land and water transport, became one of the most important hubs for the Sino-Russian tea trade. Ancient Eastern commodities began to flow from this city to the distant European continent.
As time moved into the mid-19th century, the ancient Chinese empire faced a “great change unseen in three millennia.” The cannons of the Opium War not only blew open the country’s gates but also completely altered its commercial landscape. With the signing of the Treaty of Tientsin in 1858 and the Convention of Peking in 1860, Hankou was designated a treaty port. An unprecedented Western commercial force, armed by the Industrial Revolution, began to pour into this ancient commercial center.
On March 21, 1861, the British Consul, W. Raymond Gingell, and the Viceroy of Huguang, Guan Wen, jointly demarcated the boundaries of the British Concession in Hankou. It stretched eastward from Hualou Lane, with a river frontage of 250 zhang (approximately 850 meters) and a depth of 110 zhang (approximately 375 meters), covering an area of about 458 mu (75 acres). For an annual rent of about 100 taels of silver, the British acquired the right to “manage at their own discretion” this tract of land. Just days earlier, the British firm Jardine, Matheson & Co. (known as Bao Shun Yang Hang) had already established a branch here, becoming the first foreign enterprise in Hankou.
Once Pandora’s box was opened, it could never be closed again. Following Britain, countries like Germany, Russia, France, and Japan arrived one after another, establishing five national concessions along the Yangtze River in Hankou (later, Belgian and Italian communities also had de facto concession areas). This strip of land, stretching for several kilometers, quickly evolved into a “state within a state,” independent of Chinese administrative and judicial control.
The establishment of the concessions dealt a devastating blow to Hankou’s traditional commercial ecosystem, which had thrived for nearly five hundred years. The new commercial powers brought entirely new rules of the game. Soaring Western-style buildings, bustling banks, insurance companies, and foreign firms sprang up within the concessions, forming a complete, modern financial and trade zone. This was a systemic advantage: Western merchants brought not only goods but also capital, credit systems, and a global market network.
The most disruptive force was technological innovation. When the whistle of the steamship sounded on the Yangtze, it heralded the end of an era. The traditional wooden boats that relied on sails and human power, and the primitive logistics of “carrying on shoulders and backs” at the docks, appeared fragile and inefficient before the steel behemoths. Steamships were not only faster and had a much larger capacity but were also unaffected by seasonal winds, completely reshaping the transportation patterns on the Yangtze. Traditional boatmen’s guilds and porters lost their livelihoods overnight.
The traditional merchant groups like the Shanxi and Huizhou merchants, who once dominated the Hankou market, retreated in defeat in this unequal competition. Their capital scale, business models, and information channels could not compete with the foreign firms, which were armed with modern financial tools and protected by extraterritoriality. The center of commercial power rapidly shifted from the Chinese business district, represented by Hanzheng Street, to the concessions along the river.
It was a process of ebb and flow. The old commercial order was disintegrating, and a new one was being built. Hankou was passively drawn into the world capitalist system, becoming a window for the dumping of Western industrial goods and the export of Chinese agricultural products. Tea, tung oil, raw silk, and pig bristles were shipped from here to the rest of the world, while cotton cloth, kerosene, and matches penetrated deep into China’s interior.
Hankou, a city born of water and thriving on commerce, bears the deep imprint of epochal changes at every critical juncture of its development. From the primitive impetus of the early Ming pioneers to the central status bestowed by the domestic commercial network in the mid-Ming; from the early stirrings of global trade in the late Ming to the coercive reshaping by Western capital in the late Qing. The tides of commercial power have washed over this river city time and again, forging its unique character—prosperous, open, mixed, and full of tension. The pulse of Hankou is, in essence, a microcosm of half a millennium of China’s modern commercial history.