Our Yangtze Cruise Ship docked and we disembarked at Jingzhou, a city located on the banks of the Yangtze River. It has been a transportation hub and commodity distribution center for 6,000 years. This ancient city has also been a strategic location of military importance since ancient times. 

Jingzhou occupies an area of 14,067 square kms and has a population of about 6.5 million. It is located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River on the Jianghan Plain which is covered by a dense network of waterways and a lake. This ancient city has been known as a place of high culture where there is much production of rice and of fish from fish farms. Jingzhou is considered one of China’s most important cultural and historic cities. 

Downstream 200 km to its east lies Wuhan, the provincial capital which will be our next destination where we are to board a bullet train to take us westward toward Yellow Mountain.

Guan Yu Statue
On our way to our first stop, the Jingzhou Museum, we passed the enormous statue of Guan Yu, the famous general in Chinese history who was later deified.
It’s 58 metres tall and weighs over 1,320 tonnes, and it contains over 4,000 strips of bronze. The monument is so big that there’s even an 8,000 sqm museum inside it! Visitors are allowed to walk up a staircase, up the 10m pedestal into the Guan Yu Museum. Guan Yu lived during China’s turbulent Three Kingdoms period. He carried an axe-like weapon called a Green Dragon Crescent Blade, which has been immortalised with him as part of the statue. The only difference is that the weapon now weighs 136 tonnes!

Jingzhou Museum
We saw interesting sights on our bus ride from the dock area. Our first stop was the Jingzhou museum which provided us with a brief overview of the long and colourful history of the area. and displayed many excavated national treasures -- about 120,000 precious ancient Chinese relics. The musuem is housed in beautiful interconnected buildings which surround a scenic ornamental lake.