Wuhan

Wuhan is where Chinese music keeps its founding legend. On the Hanyang bank, at the Guqin Terrace, the zither master Boya is said to have played for the woodcutter Zhong Ziqi — the only listener who truly understood his music; when Ziqi died, Boya broke his strings and never played again. From that story comes zhiyin, "the one who knows the sound", the Chinese word for a true friend — and when Wuhan built its great modern stage, it named it accordingly: the Qintai Grand Theatre, the "Zither Terrace" theatre beside Moon Lake, the venue documented in the concert record, where the city's opera, ballet and symphonic seasons play under the legend's patronage.

The city is a triple one — Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, fused at the meeting of the Yangtze and the Han — and it thinks in rivers and poems: the Yellow Crane Tower has been rebuilt for seventeen centuries because the verses written about it refuse to let it die. Hankou's treaty-port bund recalls the era when this was "the Chicago of China"; Wuchang fired the first shots of the 1911 revolution that ended the empire. East Lake spreads its cherry blossoms each spring beside one of the world's largest university populations, fuelled by hot dry noodles eaten at a walk. Two rivers, three towns, one word for friendship — Wuhan's acoustics were tuned early.