Wuhan (10.4 million inhabitants): capital of Hubei province at the Yangtze–Han confluence — birthplace of the 1911 revolution, a steel and auto manufacturing centre, and a major inland transport hub.
Last updated: October 2026
| Country | China |
|---|---|
| Population | 10.4 million |
Source: UN World Urbanization Prospects, 2022 Revision (metropolitan agglomeration estimate). Observation date: 2022. The Bureau cross-checked major-city figures against UN WUP; smaller-city figures are presented as published and have not been individually re-verified.
Wuhan has a metropolitan population of 10.4 million, according to the UN World Urbanization Prospects (2022 Revision) cited on this page.
Wuhan is in China. It is the capital of Hubei province, at the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers in central China.
Wuhan is known as the city where the 1911 Wuchang Uprising launched the revolution that ended imperial China, as a steel and automobile manufacturing centre, and as the city where COVID-19 was first identified in December 2019.
Modern Wuhan was formed in 1927 from the merger of three towns on opposite banks of the Yangtze and Han rivers: Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang. In 1911, the Wuchang Uprising by revolutionary soldiers in the city set off the Xinhai Revolution, which toppled the Qing dynasty and ended more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China.
Hankou was one of the treaty ports opened to foreign trade in the 19th century, and the city became a commercial and industrial centre. During the Second Sino-Japanese War, Wuhan briefly served as China’s wartime capital in 1938 before the government moved further inland.
Wuhan is a major industrial centre built on steel, automobile manufacturing — including the Dongfeng Motor Corporation — and the Optics Valley, a hub for fibre optics, lasers and semiconductors. Its universities make it one of central China’s leading research cities.
The city sits at the crossing of China’s main north–south and east–west rail lines and is a major Yangtze port, making it the principal transport and logistics hub of central China. In December 2019, the first cases of COVID-19 were identified in Wuhan; the city’s lockdown in early 2020 became one of the defining events of the pandemic.
