Red Building (Wuchang Uprising Memorial Hall)

The Red Building, a two-story red-brick and red-tile structure completed in 1910 as the seat of the Hubei Provincial Consultative Bureau, stands in Wuchang District, Wuhan, as the birthplace of modern republican China. On the night of October 10, 1911, mutinying units of the New Army seized the building and declared the establishment of the Hubei Military Government, an event that ignited the Xinhai Revolution and led within months to the abdication of the last Qing emperor. The building preserves the original meeting hall where the revolutionary military government was proclaimed, along with reconstructed offices, period furniture, telegraph equipment, and flags used during the uprising. A bronze statue of Sun Yat-sen stands in the forecourt facing the building's colonnaded facade, a style typical of early 20th-century Western-influenced Chinese civic architecture. The curatorial approach is chronological, walking visitors from the lead-up to the uprising through the proclamation of the republic and the building's later use as a government seat. The structure underwent major restoration in the 1980s and again ahead of the uprising's centennial in 2011, and it is now maintained as a protected national cultural relic with its exterior brickwork and interior layout kept close to the 1911 original.