Zhongshan Warship Museum

The Zhongshan Warship Museum, in Jiangxia District south of central Wuhan, is built around the raised and restored hull of the gunboat Zhongshan, originally launched in 1913 and renamed in 1925 in honor of Sun Yat-sen, whose posthumous name was Zhongshan. The vessel was sunk by Japanese aerial bombing on October 24, 1938, during the Battle of Wuhan, and lay on the riverbed of the Yangtze for over five decades before being salvaged in 1997. The museum, purpose-built around a dry-dock display hall, exhibits the restored ship itself alongside recovered personal effects of the crew, ammunition, and ship fittings, presenting the vessel as both a naval relic and a memorial to the sailors who died defending it. Surrounding galleries cover the broader history of the early Republican Chinese navy, the Battle of Wuhan campaign of 1938, and the political significance of the ship's renaming after Sun Yat-sen, who had personally used an earlier vessel of the same name during the 1922 Canton Merchants' Corps Incident. The dry-dock hall is climate-controlled to slow corrosion of the century-old steel hull, and conservation work has focused on stabilizing the original structure rather than full reconstruction, leaving battle damage from the 1938 bombing visible on the hull. Curatorially the museum combines an object-led naval history display with the ship's dramatic salvage story as the central narrative thread.