Wuhu
— — a river city the rice barges still remember.
Not only on a wall.
“A prefecture city on the south bank of the Yangtze, where the Qingyi River joins the main channel in southern Anhui province. Wuhu was one of the four great rice markets of the late Qing, a treaty port from 1876, and is now the home of Chery Automobile and the first combined rail-and-road bridge across the lower Yangtze. The old town sits on the river; the new districts climb the hills to the south.
Wuhu, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Wuhu is a prefecture-level city in southern Anhui Province, on the south bank of the Yangtze River at its confluence with the Qingyi River. The 2020 census recorded a population of about 3.65 million in the prefecture and roughly 1.6 million in the urban districts. The city sits roughly 90 kilometres downstream from Nanjing and 360 kilometres upstream from Shanghai. Wuhu was opened as a treaty port under the Chefoo Convention of 1876 and remains a major Yangtze shipping hub, with the Wuhu Yangtze River Bridge completed in 2000 as the first combined rail-and-road crossing of the lower river.
Wuhu rose to commercial importance in the late Qing as one of the four great rice markets of China, alongside Wuxi, Jiujiang, and Changsha, drawing grain from the lower Yangtze plain and shipping it downriver to Shanghai. The British treaty-port settlement was formally established in 1877 after the Chefoo Convention. After 1949 the city industrialised in textiles and shipbuilding; in 1997 it became the founding home of Chery Automobile, which has since grown into one of the largest carmakers in China.
The city is reached from Shanghai or Nanjing on the Shanghai–Wuhan high-speed rail, with a journey of about three hours from Shanghai Hongqiao to Wuhu Station, or under an hour from Nanjing South. The Fangte theme parks at the eastern edge of the city are a major draw, pulling more than ten million visitors a year across four parks. The old British consulate on Fanchang Hill and the riverside promenade at Zhongshan Road are walked in an afternoon. Tunxi, the gateway to the Huangshan mountains, is about 200 kilometres south.