Cuddled in the very heart of Anhui, Hefei, the capital of the province, is an ancient town with more than 2,000 years of history. Unfortunately much of this is not overly noticeable, and most travelers will neglect the area, or merely pass it en route to Anhui's more scenic spot, Huangshan, to the southeast. The most stirring interest with the city is in the ancient tales from this area, partly immortalised in the book The Three Kingdoms (Sanguo yanyi). This book is still known today as one of the series of four ancient Chinese classics, other three naming The Water Margin (Shui huzhuan), Journey to the West (Xi you ji) and The Dream of the Red Chamber (Honglou meng).
Accounts of the city only came to popular fame after 200 AD, around the time that the crumbling Eastern Han Dynasty (25-220 AD) was at an end. As with most cases of dynastic decline, it was the military strategists most capable of instigating the discontented masses that were to rise to the fore. These were the warlords, that were soon to become kings of their own fiefdoms, most famously the Shu Han Kingdom (221-263 AD), the Wei Kingdom (220-265 AD) and the Wu Kingdom (222-280 AD).
Hefei, a small town at that time, was of strategic importance since practically it was the center of this region. For the town it was the bloody battles that occurred between Caocao's Wei forces and the troops of the Wu Kingdom's Sun Quan that remain as popular stories. There remain a few relics around town that remember these times, most notably the battleground of Leisure Ford, that is now a park, and the site of the troops drillground, that is now the Mingjiao Temple.
The city was to return to its position as an administrative and economic area. Almost eight centuries after the struggles of the Three Kingdoms period, in the Northern Song (960-1127 AD), came the birth of a Hefei child who was to become a paragon for Chinese. Named Bao Zheng, this child was to grow up to become known as the most conscientious and uncorrupt high official in all of China. The area where he was born, Hefei, still commemorates his honest name, by displaying the tools of his trade, his execution cutters, and the area where he allegedly used to live, in a park just to the southeast of the city center.
From this time on Hefei was to remain in relative quiescence, broken only once in the latter years of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911 AD) with the struggles of the Taiping Rebellion (1851-1860 AD). After a demographic revolution in the early 1900s, the city became a regional trading hub, and this continued until after the Communist succession, when the development of rail lines helped to further boost its economy and secure its position as the provincial capital. Today Hefei is the industrial center of the province, with a population of 1.2 million, although for a city of its size it is not overly polluted. It is also well known as a center for learning, and is now home to more than 30 universities and institutes of higher education. The most renowned of these, the University of Science and Technology (Zhongguo kexue jishu daxue), has in recent years become fairly contentious in sending many of its students abroad for study. For travelers the area is not all bad, helped both by the ring of parks that circle the city center, and a fairly friendly atmosphere.