I was born in Qingshan, an industrial district of Wuhan, a megacity that sprawls along the Yangtze River in central China. Qingshan grew up around the Wuhan Iron and Steel Corporation, or WISCO, a massive government development project built in the late 1950s. Most of the residents migrated to work at that instant community, including my grandfather and grandmother, who arrived from northeastern China, a culturally distinct region called Dongbei. They brought with them their past experience working at steel plants, as well as their memories and accent from their faraway homeland—a sometimes chilly region that might be called the Alaska of China.
I am a visual artist. My family’s rambling history prompted questions. Where and what is the meaning of home? How do I define my hometown? Is it Wuhan Qingshan? Yes, and no. And herein lay the first steps of an art project I launched to explore the hidden family connections binding my life to one of the great internal migrations in China during the 20th century.
When I learned of Paul Salopek's plans to walk through my family’s ancestral homeland of Dongbei, I got in touch with him, hoping to join him and experience both the slow journey that my grandparents once undertook and see the landscapes they once carried with them. My intention: link the geography and historical narratives of that remote part of China with my own internal maps. I would walk to my grandmother's and grandfather’s home villages, recording videos, interviews, and impressions along the way.
Corn harvests dry beside rural roads in Liaoning Province, once home to artist Han Qian’s grandparents before they moved, like millions of other Chinese, to industrial centers in the 20th century.
Paul Salopek
Originally, Paul and I planned to start walking together from the coastal city of Jinzhou, then trek north across the swampy Liao River Plain, and finally follow the South Manchurian Railway all the way up to Shenyang, the largest urban center in China’s northeast.
But as it turned out, our hike through the harvest season in the region reaped its own surprises. The countryside of rustling grains was beautiful in autumn light. Farmers were busy collecting corn with tractors. But many roads were made of hardened concrete—a punishing surface to walk on. After a few days of constant foot pounding, I strained an Achilles tendon, and unfortunately I had to drop out of the walk. But I continued my research alone by bus and train.
What I discovered was that Dongbei—the “starting line” for my family’s wanderings—was itself layered with intense human movement.
Han Qian's grandmother, Yang Guihua, and grandfather, Han Shouzhi, pictured in their first home in Wuhan.
Photograph courtesy Han Qian
Until the end of the Qing dynasty and the birth of the Republic of China in the early 1900s, the lower reaches of China's Yellow River flooded frequently, forcing tides of people to flee into Dongbei—resulting in one of the largest population shifts in human history. Around 1910, the population increased from almost zero to 18 million. Among this mass migration were the figures of my great-great-grandparents.
But there was little peace. Tsarist Russia soon colonized northeastern China, building railroads and extracting resources. And after the Russo-Japanese War, Japan occupied the region, taking control of the South Manchuria Railway and the towns and cities along its way. This included the village of my grandfather, Niuzhuang, and my grandmother’s village, Jiucaitai. European governments grabbed bits of Dongbei too. As early as 1858, Niuzhuang was listed as an open port by the British, who simply changed the names of the towns to suit their commercial treaty’s geographical boundaries.
On my trip with Paul to Dongbei, I met my grandmother's brother in Niuzhang for the first time, a retired farmer named Yang Laoliu. When my grandparents moved to Wuhan to help build WISCO in 1958, Yang stayed in the village.
Listening to his oral histories, I learned that there was once a "Yang Village" settled by 19th-century migrants with the same surname. Nowadays, Yang Village is long gone.
As an artist, this made me consider the power of imagination over memory and forgetting. During the COVID-19 lockdowns in Wuhan, I had created a conceptual art piece where I confined myself inside a room without clocks, with no sense of time. In my numerous dreams, images of the rural areas in Dongbei began to come to me: large fields of sunflowers, huge iron gates, snarling wolf dogs, and a little boy playing with me around a big round table. In the randomness of my daily routine, dreams, reality, and memories became indistinguishable.
Han Qian's grandmother, Yang Guihua, and grandfather, Han Shouzhi, pictured in their first home in Wuhan.
Photograph courtesy Han Qian
Until the end of the Qing dynasty and the birth of the Republic of China in the early 1900s, the lower reaches of China's Yellow River flooded frequently, forcing tides of people to flee into Dongbei—resulting in one of the largest population shifts in human history. Around 1910, the population increased from almost zero to 18 million. Among this mass migration were the figures of my great-great-grandparents.
But there was little peace. Tsarist Russia soon colonized northeastern China, building railroads and extracting resources. And after the Russo-Japanese War, Japan occupied the region, taking control of the South Manchuria Railway and the towns and cities along its way. This included the village of my grandfather, Niuzhuang, and my grandmother’s village, Jiucaitai. European governments grabbed bits of Dongbei too. As early as 1858, Niuzhuang was listed as an open port by the British, who simply changed the names of the towns to suit their commercial treaty’s geographical boundaries.
On my trip with Paul to Dongbei, I met my grandmother's brother in Niuzhang for the first time, a retired farmer named Yang Laoliu. When my grandparents moved to Wuhan to help build WISCO in 1958, Yang stayed in the village.
Listening to his oral histories, I learned that there was once a "Yang Village" settled by 19th-century migrants with the same surname. Nowadays, Yang Village is long gone.
As an artist, this made me consider the power of imagination over memory and forgetting. During the COVID-19 lockdowns in Wuhan, I had created a conceptual art piece where I confined myself inside a room without clocks, with no sense of time. In my numerous dreams, images of the rural areas in Dongbei began to come to me: large fields of sunflowers, huge iron gates, snarling wolf dogs, and a little boy playing with me around a big round table. In the randomness of my daily routine, dreams, reality, and memories became indistinguishable.
A steel plant along the Yangtze River in Wuhan.
Han Qian
So it is with most migrations. Rarely are they ever one-way. My family traveled physically from the north to the south, from ancestral time to the present, from the agrarian society of Dongbei to the industrial apartment blocks of Wuhan, from one system to another. Yet in the imagination, we both leave and stay. So what do people take away? What do they bring back? What is left behind, and what is lost? The shimmer of memory left behind in the dust of these old trails pulls me on. I explore these questions through my work.
Walking in Dongbei, I toted paradoxes in my rucksack: Moving under the bright sunshine, through windblown cornfields, I felt the heavy weight of history yet also a pervasive lightness—the unreachable absence of memory.
Han Qian is a Chinese artist and writer whose work in recent years has revolved around the threads of family and migration.