Huanggang sits on the Yangtze’s north bank in eastern Hubei, its territory climbing from the river plain into the southern slopes of the Dabie Mountains, at the point where Hubei, Henan, Anhui and Jiangxi meet.
黄冈地处湖北东部长江北岸，境内地势由沿江平原向大别山南麓逐渐抬升，恰好处在湖北、河南、安徽、江西四省交界之处。
Administratively, the city covers 17,457 square kilometres across one urban district, two county-level cities and seven counties, with a registered population of over 7 million and a resident population of 5.79 million.
黄冈全市面积17457平方公里，下辖1个市辖区、2个县级市和7个县，户籍人口超过700万，常住人口579.24万。
In 2024, Huanggang’s GDP reached ¥321.665 billion, up 6.2 percent on the year and, for the first time, past the ¥300 billion mark, making it the sixth city in Hubei to cross that threshold. Forest cover stood at 40.46 percent.
2024年，黄冈市地区生产总值达到3216.65亿元，同比增长6.2％，首次突破3000亿元大关，成为湖北省第六个跨过这一门槛的地级市。森林覆盖率为40.46％。
The Huanggang–Huangmei high-speed railway, opened in 2022 as part of the Beijing–Hong Kong–Macau corridor, ended the last of the old revolutionary-era counties’ long wait for high-speed rail, running alongside the conventional Beijing–Kowloon line that has crossed the city for decades.
2022年通车的黄黄高铁，是京港（澳）高铁通道的一部分，结束了大别山革命老区多个县市不通高铁的历史，与已运营数十年的普速京九铁路并行贯穿全市。
Eight expressways and seven Yangtze River bridges connect Huanggang by road. The city has no civil airport of its own, but sits directly across the river from Ezhou Huahu International, home to SF Express’s cargo hub since 2022. Three other airports worldwide are built the same way, around a single carrier’s cargo operations: Memphis for FedEx, Louisville for UPS, and Leipzig/Halle for DHL. Huahu is the fourth such hub in the world and the first in Asia, a different measure from cargo volume, where Hong Kong International has ranked first for 18 straight years without being built around one carrier. Wuhan Tianhe International, less than 100km away, handles passenger flights for the region.
八条高速公路与七座长江大桥构成了黄冈的公路网络。黄冈本地没有民用机场，但与鄂州花湖国际机场隔江相望，花湖机场自2022年起是顺丰速运的专属货运枢纽。全球以同样模式打造、专为单一航空公司货运业务服务的机场还有三座：孟菲斯之于联邦快递、路易斯维尔之于UPS、莱比锡/哈雷之于敦豪（DHL）。花湖机场是这类枢纽机场中全球第四座、亚洲第一座，这与货邮吞吐量排名是两个不同的概念——已连续18年货邮吞吐量全球第一的香港国际机场，并非为单一航空公司打造的专属枢纽。距黄冈不到100公里的武汉天河国际机场，承担着本地区的客运功能。
Su Dongpo, Bi Sheng and a Rival Red Cliff
苏东坡、毕昇与另一处赤壁
Huangzhou district, Huanggang’s urban core, is where the Song-dynasty poet Su Shi lived in exile from 1080 to 1084, producing 753 works there, including the ci poem “Remembering the Red Cliff” and his two Red Cliff rhapsodies. Su Shi wrote them about a riverside cliff he took for the Three Kingdoms battlefield; it was not, and the site is now known distinctly as the “Wenchibi”, or literary Red Cliff, as opposed to the “Wuchibi”, or military Red Cliff, in nearby Xianning.
黄冈的中心城区黄州，正是宋代文豪苏轼被贬谪于此的地方，时间为1080年至1084年，他在此创作了753篇作品，包括《念奴娇·赤壁怀古》和前后《赤壁赋》。苏轼笔下的赤壁，实为他误认作三国古战场的一处江边峭壁，如今这里被明确称为”文赤壁”，以区别于邻近咸宁的”武赤壁”。
Yingshan county, in Huanggang’s mountainous north, was the birthplace of Bi Sheng, the Song-dynasty inventor of movable-type printing, who died around 1051, more than four centuries before Gutenberg’s metal type. His tomb, verified by inscription in 1995, was added to the national list of protected heritage sites in 2019, and a memorial park on the site opened in 2023.
黄冈北部山区的英山县，是宋代活字印刷术发明者毕昇的故乡，他约卒于1051年，比古腾堡发明金属活字印刷早了四百多年。经碑文考证确认的毕昇墓，于1995年得到鉴定，2019年列入全国重点文物保护单位，毕昇纪念园于2023年建成开园。
Qichun county produced the Ming-dynasty physician Li Shizhen, author of the Compendium of Materia Medica, a work later inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register; the county now markets itself as the home of Chinese mugwort medicine under the slogan “hometown of Li Shizhen, China’s Ai Cao capital”. Huangmei county, meanwhile, gave its name to Huangmei Opera, now one of China’s five major opera forms, and was where the fourth and fifth patriarchs of Chan Buddhism, Daoxin and Hongren, taught in the 7th century.
蕲春县是明代医药学家李时珍的故乡，其著作《本草纲目》后来被列入联合国教科文组织《世界记忆名录》，如今蕲春以”时珍故里·中国艾都”为口号推广蕲艾产业。黄梅县则孕育了黄梅戏，如今已是中国五大戏曲剧种之一，7世纪时，禅宗四祖道信与五祖弘忍也曾在此传法。
Two Presidents and a County of Generals
两位国家主席与一个将军县
Hong’an county, in Huanggang’s northwest, was a centre of the Eyuwan Communist base area in the late 1920s and 1930s and is recorded as the birthplace of over 200 People’s Liberation Army generals, along with two men who later served as head of state: Dong Biwu, one of the founding delegates of the Chinese Communist Party’s first congress, and Li Xiannian, who served as President of China from 1983 to 1988.
黄冈西北部的红安县，是二十世纪二三十年代鄂豫皖革命根据地的中心区域，据记载，这里走出了200多位中国人民解放军将领，还走出了两位后来担任国家最高领导职务的人物：中共一大代表之一董必武，以及1983年至1988年担任国家主席的李先念。
Huanggang’s more recent reputation rests on education: “Huanggang Secret Papers”, a series of exam-preparation workbooks first compiled by Huanggang Middle School teachers, became a nationwide byword for exam drilling from the 1990s onward, and the city’s schools remain closely associated with strong performance in China’s national university entrance exam.
黄冈近年来的名声则更多与教育相关。”黄冈密卷”是由黄冈中学教师最初编写的一系列应试练习册，自上世纪九十年代起成为全国范围内应试训练的代名词，黄冈的中学也因此与高考中的优异表现紧密联系在一起。
The city’s economy also draws on 73 identified mineral types, including phosphate rock reserves of 17 million tonnes concentrated in Huangmei and Wuxue, and on a river-sand base along the Ba, Xi, Qi, Dao and Ju rivers estimated at a billion tonnes, among the largest in the middle and lower Yangtze.
黄冈的经济还依托于已探明的73种矿产，其中磷矿石储量达1698.5万吨，主要分布在黄梅、武穴一带；巴水、浠水、蕲水、倒水、举水五条河流的黄沙储量约十亿吨，是长江中下游最大的黄沙基地之一。
