History
Among the highlights of the archaeology and history in this area are
the Ba, a little known group who lived here from about the 16th century
B.C. to the third century B.C., their capitals in Chongqing and Chengdu.
They were worshippers of white tigers and left behind some very
distinctive and impressive bronzes in humanoid forms. See Chengdu.
There are also some relics in the Chongqing museum. These are the
people whose hanging coffins you look for in the streams above the
Yangtze.
The Kingdom of Chu dominated what is now Hubei from about 770 B.C. until it was taken over by the King of Qin, the first emperor of China in 221 B.C. This was the period of the poet-statesman Quyuan, whose death inspired the first dragon boat races.
The Three Kingdom's period started about 220 A.D. with an oath in a peach orchard, and ended in 265 A.D. during which battles were fought between contending kingdoms, the Wei, Shu and Wu. Ask about the famous Battle of the Red Cliffs west of Wuhan.
The Yangtze was also frequented by foreign merchants, gunboats, and missionaries in the late 1800s and early 1900s, but guides will not give you much information about this embarrassing period. This is the background of the novel and movie, The Sand Pebbles. Nobel and Pulitzer prize winner Pearl S. Buck lived and worked in Zhenjiang downstream.
