Wuhan played key role in plan for national railway network

In 1864, Wuhan was proposed as a major railway hub, and British company Jardine Matheson asked the engineer Rowland Macdonald Stephenson to carry out field research in China and draw up a master plan for a national rail network.

Stephenson, from Britain, suggested making Hankou, a port area of Wuhan on the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, a center for the network, connecting Shanghai in the east, Guangzhou in the south and Tianjin in the north.

In 1865, in an attempt to attract the attention of the Empress Dowager Cixi, a British businessman obtained approval through bribing local governors in Beijing, and finally managed to build a 500-meter-long narrow-gauge railway at the foot of ramparts along the city moat surrounding the Forbidden City.