Hubei Province << hoo bay >> is a manufacturing and agricultural province in central China. The province is a major producer of iron and steel and of motor vehicles. Important crops in Hubei include cotton, rice, tea, and wheat. The province covers 72,400 square miles (187,500 square kilometers). Wuhan is the capital city. Hubei is also spelled Hupei or Hupeh.
Hubei was once known as the “Province of a Thousand Lakes.” Today, it has fewer than 100 lakes. Hong Lake and Liangzi Lake are two of the largest. The Yangtze River flows through southern Hubei. Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest dam, spans the Yangtze near the city of Yichang.
For much of its history, the area that is now Hubei lay at the center of various Chinese kingdoms. From the 1200’s to the 1600’s, Hubei and neighboring Hunan formed a single province called Huguang. The Manchus, a people who conquered China in the 1600’s, officially established Hubei Province in 1664.
Over the centuries, Hubei suffered great damage from Yangtze River floods. One of the worst was the flood of 1931, which killed about 3.7 million people in Hubei and several other provinces. Three Gorges Dam was built partly to control flooding. The dam began to operate at full capacity in 2010. Its reservoir covered many towns and villages in Hubei with water, forcing the people to move.
In late 2019, Wuhan became the center of an outbreak of a previously unknown respiratory disease caused by a type of coronavirus. In January 2020, the Chinese government tried to stop the spread of the contagious disease by restricting travel into and out of Wuhan and several nearby cities. Within those areas, government officials limited public activity and set up emergency medical facilities. Nevertheless, within weeks, the disease had spread to other parts of China, infecting tens of thousands of people. It soon spread to other countries as well. In February, the World Health Organization (WHO) named the disease COVID-19, for COronaVIrus Disease 2019. In March, the WHO declared the outbreak a pandemic.
The number of new cases of COVID-19 in Hubei Province declined by late March 2020, and the Chinese government eased its travel restrictions. Travel restrictions were eased for Wuhan in April. Some social and business restrictions remained in effect, however. By May and June, authorities reported few new local cases of the disease. But in 2021 and 2022, stricter measures against COVID-19 were put in place in Hubei and across China in response to new, more contagious variants (forms) of the virus. The Chinese government eased these restrictions in late 2022, and a sharp increase in cases resulted. The number of cases stabilized by the spring of 2023.
