South of Dongting, Hunan's economy tops many nations
Hunan—south of Dongting Lake—holds just over 66 million people on about 210,000 square kilometres, China's seventh-most populous province, with capital Changsha. Recent nominal output near five and a half trillion yuan places it among the world's largest subnational economies.
Hunan means south of the lake, again Dongting, and its licence plates carry Xiāng for the Xiang River, which flows north through the province past Changsha. Mountains and hills enclose the east, south and west, while the centre and north form a U-shaped basin open to the north around Lake Dongting, China's second-largest freshwater lake, where the Xiang, Zi, Yuan and Lishui rivers meet the Yangtze. The province covers 211,800 square kilometres and gets 1,200 to 1,700 millimetres of rain a year.
Ancestors of the Miao, Tujia, Dong and Yao first lived in its forests, and the region entered written history around 350 BC. Qin took it after conquering Chu in 278 BC; later it was the Han's Changsha Kingdom and, in the 10th century, the independent Ma Chu. The Red Turban revolts against the Yuan began here. Hunan was carved from Huguang in 1664, and its grain surpluses fed much of China.
Tang-era Changsha mass-produced ceramics for export; the Belitung wreck, an Arab dhow of the 830s found off Indonesia, carried more than 60,000 pieces. The Yuelu Academy, one of ancient China's four great academies, later became Hunan University, and Song painters and poets made the Xiaoxiang region a symbol of officials unjustly dismissed.
A famine in 1920 killed about two million people, and in 1927 Mao Zedong led the Autumn Harvest Uprising and set up a short-lived Hunan Soviet. Liu Shaoqi, Hu Yaobang, Peng Dehuai and He Long were also Hunanese. Wulingyuan became a UNESCO site in 1992, and output of about US$790 billion in 2025 made Hunan China's tenth-largest provincial economy.
Source: Hunan
