Wuhan Flood Control Monument

In the summer of 1954, the Yangtze River swelled to a record 29.73 meters, threatening to submerge the city of Wuhan. For over one hundred days, more than one million soldiers and citizens fought the rushing, muddy waters. They formed human walls along the dikes, carrying heavy sandbags by hand to hold back the river.

To honor this struggle, chief architect Yuan Peihuang and his team designed a monument, completed in September 1969 on the Hankou Jiangtan river dikes. The structure rises thirty-seven meters high, its core of steel and concrete wrapped in rough yellow granite. The base platform stands 4.9 meters high, a number chosen to represent the year of Wuhan's liberation. At the summit, a red five-pointed star measuring 1.8 meters in diameter casts a glowing red light over the river at night, supported by twenty sculpted red flags that mark the twentieth anniversary of the People's Republic of China.

Human hands left their mark across the stone. Sculptor Cao Guochang and his colleagues spent months carving the forty-eight-meter-long reliefs on the base. They chiseled fifty-one distinct figures of soldiers, workers, and peasants with strained muscles and determined faces. These stone figures carry sandbags and hold plaques bearing the slogan, "First, fear not hardship; second, fear not death." Surrounding the base, the stone balustrades are carved with wheat, cotton, and blast furnaces, representing the daily labor of the nation.

On the front of the shaft, a portrait of Mao Zedong sits above his gold-plated aluminum-alloy handwritten inscription. The reverse side bears his poem, Swimming, carved directly into the stone. Directly beneath the granite steps, the Wuhan Flood Control Exhibition preserves the historical archives of the city's encounters with water in 1931, 1954, and 1998. Today, the monument stands as a quiet sentinel, watching the river flow past the dikes.