Culturally Rich

Honghu City

Honghu City

Honghu is a county-level city in the municipal region of Jingzhou, in the south of Hubei province. The city lies on the northwest (left) bank of the Yangtze River, across from Hunan Province and Xianning, Hubei. It is named after the adjacent Hong Lake, which since ancient times has periodically flooded.

The traditional Chinese holiday, Dragon Boat Festival, celebrated on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month, features boat races that are run on Hong Lake.

Through its famous lake, Honghu City produces forty kinds of fish and an abundance of plants, such as lotus, reed and a type of black algae.

As of 2000, Honghu City had a population of 335,618.

 Honghu Lake, Hubei Province’s biggest lake, is “a place better than paradise” with abundant fish, rice, lotus and ducks, says a popular Chinese folk song. This was true until overfishing ruined the 41,000-hectare wetland. To revive Honghu, the local government has taken a series of protective measures, such as getting rid of all the fences and nets used to trap fish, monitoring water quality and using treatments that target specific problems and relocating fishermen living around the lake. Now, after continuous efforts, the lake is coming back to life. Water quality has largely been rehabilitated, and the number of wild birds living here has risen from 2,000 to more than 100,000 

The Honghu Lake revitalisation is an important project and is widely acknowledged for its success by all parties, it is known as the Honghu Ecotourism Scenic Area in Honghu City.

Honghu is celebrated as an important supporter of the Communist side during the last century’s Chinese Civil War. Westerners know it for New Zealander Rewi Alley’s relief work and Gung-ho a co-operative movement.

 Civil War 

In the civil war period 

Honghu and other regions around its lake were part of an essential communist stronghold called the Hunan-Western Hubei Revolutionary Base Area, also called the Hunan-Western Hubei Soviet. The Hunan-Western Hubei Soviet was actually a collection of several isolated bases linked together by underground and guerrilla activities. The Honghu Base, the largest, was itself the object of four Encirclement Campaigns, the last of which was strategised as one stage of the broadly successful Encirclement Campaign against Hunan-Western Hubei Soviet.

The base area or soviet was under the leadership of communist general (later Field Marshal) He Long through most of its existence and defended by his Second Army Group, finally crushed by Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese Army and various allied warlord forces. He Long co-ordinated in his Encirclement Campaigns, the Soviet and its military force and retreated westward to form the Hunan-Hubei-Sichuan-Guizhou revolutionary base area. Which in October 1934 refuged the retreating troops of the Sixth Army Group Folding the men of the Sixth into his ranks. He Long formed the Second Front Red Army which was to take its own route on the Long March.

 A major modern Chinese opera first performed in October 1956 in Wuhan City called the Red Guards on Honghu Lake by the Hubei Experimental Theatre Society. The six act opera is set in Honghu, Hubei and tells the true story how local Red Guards in Mianyang, Hubei Province rose up against local bully Peng Batian in 1930 during which heroine Han Ying sacrifices herself to save the people of her hometown.. Its music was composed by Zhu Benhe, Zhang Jing’an, and Ouyang Qianshu. It was adapted to the cinema in 1961.

Rewi Alley and his connection to Honghu

Flood Relief

Rewi Alley carried out flood relief in Honghu 1932 to assist the civilians who were caught in the middle of the civil war and needed to escape the rising floodwaters when the Yangtze River flood the area.

 Gung Ho

Famous for the Gung Ho Cooperative movement that he founded (along with others) during the Second Sino-Japanese War (World War Two), Alley established half a dozen small-scale industrial co-operatives in Honghu under the revamped Gung Ho movement he led in the 1980s.

 In Honghu the deeds of Rewi Alley are acknowledged and remembered.

Main/Revolutionary Museum in Honghu City

Rewi Alley Memorial Hall and Residence are run as a sub-branch of this museum.