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Hubei

Hubei is a province in Central China. It has the seventh-largest economy among Chinese provinces, the second-largest within Central China, and the third-largest among inland provinces. Its provincial capital at Wuhan serves as a major political, cultural, and economic hub for the region.

Hubei is associated with the historical state of E that existed during the Western Zhou dynasty (c. 1045 – 771 BCE). Its name means 'north of the lake', referring to Dongting Lake. It borders Henan to the north, Anhui and Jiangxi to the east, Hunan to the south, and Chongqing and Shaanxi to the west. The high-profile Three Gorges Dam is located at Yichang in the west of the province.

The Hubei region was home to sophisticated Neolithic cultures. By the Spring and Autumn period (770–476 BC), the territory of today's Hubei formed part of the powerful State of Chu. Chu, nominally a tributary state of the Zhou dynasty, was itself an extension of the Chinese civilization that had emerged some centuries before in the north; but Chu also represented a culturally unique blend of northern and southern culture, and it developed into a powerful state that controlled much of the middle and lower Yangtze River, with its power extending northwards into the North China Plain.

During the Warring States period (475–221 BC) Chu became the major adversary of the upstart State of Qin to the northwest (in present-day Guanzhong, Shaanxi province), which began to assert itself by outward expansionism. As wars between Qin and Chu ensued, Chu lost more and more land: first its dominance over the Sichuan Basin, then (in 278 BC) its heartland, which correspond to modern Hubei. In 223 BC Qin chased down the remnants of the Chu regime, which had fled eastwards during Qin's wars of uniting China.

Qin founded the Qin dynasty in 221 BC, the first unified dynasty in China. The Qin dynasty was succeeded in 206 BC by the Han dynasty, which established the province (zhou) of Jingzhou in today's Hubei and Hunan. The Qin and Han played an active role in the extension of farmland in Hubei, maintaining a system of river dikes to protect farms from summer floods. Towards the end of the Eastern Han dynasty in the beginning of the 3rd century, Jingzhou was ruled by regional warlord Liu Biao. After his death in 208, Liu Biao's realm was surrendered by his successors to Cao Cao, a powerful warlord who had conquered nearly all of north China; but in the Battle of Red Cliffs (208 or 209), warlords Liu Bei and Sun Quan drove Cao Cao out of Jingzhou. Liu Bei then took control of Jingzhou and appointed Guan Yu as administrator of Xiangyang (in modern Xiangyang, Hubei) to guard Jing province; he went on to conquer Yizhou (the Sichuan Basin), but lost Jingzhou to Sun Quan; for the next few decades Jingzhou was controlled by the Wu Kingdom, ruled by Sun Quan and his successors.

The incursion of northern nomadic peoples into the region at the beginning of the 4th century (Five Barbarians' rebellion and Disaster of Yongjia (永嘉之乱)) began nearly three centuries of division into a nomad-ruled (but increasingly Sinicized) north and a Han Chinese-ruled south. Hubei, to the south, remained under southern rule for this entire period, until the unification of China by the Sui dynasty in 589. In 617 the Tang dynasty replaced Sui, and later on the Tang dynasty placed present-day Hubei under the jurisdiction of several circuits: Jiangnanxi Circuit in the south; Shannandong Circuit (山南东道) in the west, and Huainan Circuit in the east. After the Tang dynasty disintegrated in the early 10th century, Hubei came under the control of several regional regimes: Jingnan in the center, Yang Wu and its successor Southern Tang to the east, the Five Dynasties to the north and Shu to Shizhou (施州, in modern Enshi, Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture).[citation needed]

The Song dynasty reunified the region in 982 and placed most of Hubei into Jinghubei Circuit, a longer version of Hubei's current name. Mongols conquered the region in 1279, and under their rule the province of Huguang was established, covering Hubei, Hunan, and parts of Guangdong and Guangxi.[citation needed] During the Mongol rule, in 1331, Hubei was devastated by an outbreak of the Black Death, which reached England, Belgium, and Italy by June 1348, and which, according to Chinese sources, spread during the following three centuries to decimate populations throughout Eurasia.

The Ming dynasty (1368–1644) drove out the Mongols in 1368. Their version of Huguang province was smaller, and corresponded almost entirely to the modern provinces of Hubei and Hunan combined. Hubei lay geographically outside the centers of the Ming power. During the last years of the Ming, today's Hubei was ravaged several times by the rebel armies of Zhang Xianzhong and Li Zicheng. The Manchu Qing dynasty which took control of much of the region in 1644, soon split Huguang into the modern provinces of Hubei and Hunan. The Qing dynasty, however, continued to maintain a Viceroy of Huguang, one of the most well-known viceroys being Zhang Zhidong (in office between 1889 and 1907), whose modernizing reforms made Hubei (especially Wuhan) into a prosperous center of commerce and industry. The Huangshi/Daye area, south-east of Wuhan, became an important center of mining and metallurgy.

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