Bagong House

At the sharp intersection of Poyang Street, Lihuangpi Road, and Lanling Road stands a red brick giant. Completed in 1910, Bagong House resembles a massive ship parting the streets of Wuhan. This five-level, masonry-timber structure was Hankou’s first multi-story apartment building, commissioned by the Russian tea merchant brothers J.K. and Zino Banov. They built it at the height of the Great Tea Road trade, employing Russian architects and the local Guandachang Construction Factory to realize their vision.

The building's physical form tells a story of structural transition. Its walls measure seventy centimeters thick on the ground floor, thinning to twenty-four centimeters at the top. At the wedge-shaped corner, a dome-topped tower resembles a monk's hat, anchoring the triangular layout that encloses a central courtyard.

Human hands have left deep marks on this clay and wood. In the early twentieth century, wealthy foreign merchants walked these halls. After 1950, the building became a dense municipal residence housing over two hundred families. For decades, the smell of coal smoke and family dinners filled the corridors. The original wooden staircases still show the physical wear of these years, with steps worn into smooth, shallow bowls by thousands of daily commutes.

During the recent restoration, which culminated in the building's reopening as a boutique hotel on December 5, 2024, eighty artisans spent nearly a year hand-scraping eighty thousand square meters of red brick. They removed layers of old paint to expose the original clay. To repair the roof, workers searched old Wuhan neighborhoods to salvage four thousand matching historical tiles. Artisan Ke Jinpeng used the traditional water-brushed stone technique to finish the massive columns, patiently washing away wet cement to reveal the gritty texture of embedded pebbles.

Today, visitors can hear the metallic click of custom-reproduced window hardware, feel the cool draft of the triangular courtyard, and visit the Great Tea Road Exhibition Hall on the ground floor. Bagong House remains a physical record of global trade, domestic survival, and meticulous preservation.