About Wuwei Television

Wuwei Television

Overview

Wuwei Television is the municipal television station of Wuwei in the Hexi Corridor of Gansu, run by the city's radio and television broadcaster within its converged media centre. Its main channel carries local news, history and livelihood programming in Mandarin. Wuwei, the ancient Liangzhou, is famous for the Bronze Galloping Horse — the 'Flying Horse of Gansu' — excavated from the Leitai Han tomb, and as a Silk Road garrison city, themes central to the station's cultural output.

No verified website is recorded for the station in this batch, and no founding date is asserted. The documented position — municipal broadcaster, converged media centre, main channel carrying news, history and livelihood programming — and the balance its record describes between a Silk Road garrison past and a modern corridor prefecture, are the factual foundation of this profile.

Wuwei, the ancient Liangzhou

Wuwei is a prefecture-level city dominating the eastern end of the Hexi Corridor, the narrow thread of oases between mountains and desert along which the Silk Road ran between China and Central Asia. Its old name is the famous one: Liangzhou, a name that echoes through Tang dynasty poetry and frontier history. As the eastern gateway of the corridor, Wuwei was a garrison city — a place where armies were stationed, horses were raised and caravans were provisioned before the long stages west to Zhangye, Jiuquan and Dunhuang.

That position still defines the prefecture. Wuwei stands where travellers enter the corridor from Lanzhou and the east, and its districts and counties spread from the corridor floor into the Qilian foothills and desert margins. A municipal broadcaster here serves a city whose identity was made by movement — of armies, horses, merchants and monks along the road — and whose modern life still follows the corridor's line.

The main channel and local programming

The main channel carries local news, history and livelihood programming in Mandarin. The station record's inclusion of history as a named category, alongside news and livelihood, is unusual and telling: in Wuwei the past is not an occasional feature subject but a standing part of the schedule, from Han tombs and Tang frontier poetry to the temples and museums of the modern city.

Within the city's converged media centre, television reporting is produced alongside radio and new-media output. For a prefecture whose fame rests on a single small bronze in a provincial museum, convergence matters: a single organisation can keep Wuwei's own sites — the Leitai tomb, the Confucian temple, the museums — in front of broadcast and online audiences together, while the main channel serves residents' daily news and services.

The Leitai Han Tomb

In 1969, local people digging an air-raid shelter beneath Leitai, an old rammed-earth platform in the north of the city, broke into a large brick tomb of the late Eastern Han dynasty. Leitai itself — a platform about 8.5 metres high in site accounts — carried a temple to the thunder god, and below it lay a three-chambered tomb that looters in antiquity had entered without finding the chamber that held its treasure.

The tomb is identified in inscription accounts as that of Zhang Jun, a general — General Zhang — who died around 186 to 219 AD, and its contents were extraordinary: some 231 artefacts in gold, silver, copper, iron, jade, stone and pottery, among them a bronze ceremonial procession of chariots and horses. Site accounts describe 99 bronze chariot, horse and figure pieces in the guard of honour — 39 horses, human figures and chariots in other museum counts of the procession — buried to serve a frontier general in the afterlife. The tomb, now preserved within Leitai Park as the largest Eastern Han tomb found in the Hexi region, is a national key cultural relic, and its discovery remains the founding story of modern Wuwei's fame.

The Bronze Galloping Horse

Among the Leitai bronzes was one that outran all the rest. The Bronze Galloping Horse, also known as the Galloping Horse Treading on a Flying Swallow and in English as the Flying Horse of Gansu, is a bronze of about 34.5 centimetres in height, 45 centimetres in length and roughly 7 kilograms in weight, cast in the Eastern Han period around the second century. The horse is caught at full gallop, head raised and neighing, three hooves in the air and the fourth resting on the back of a flying bird — a swallow, in the traditional reading — whose startled turn of the head sets off the horse's impossible speed.

The design solves a sculptor's problem with a poet's answer: the bird is both the proof of speed — the horse moves faster than flight — and the statue's point of balance. The horse is now in the Gansu Provincial Museum in Lanzhou, but it is Wuwei's discovery and Wuwei's symbol; its likeness stands in the city's squares, including Wenhua Square, and replicas hold the place of honour at Leitai itself. In the 1980s the sculpture was designated the symbol of tourism in China, carrying the image of a Wuwei tomb to every corner of the country.

Heavenly horses and the horse-breeding frontier

The bronze was no accident of subject. Its horse is understood as a portrayal of the 'heavenly horses' of Dayuan — Fergana, in present-day Central Asia — the breed Emperor Han Wudi sought through expeditions to the Western Regions, prized for build and stamina as warhorses and remembered in the legend of horses that sweated blood. Smooth passage along the Hexi Corridor was the route by which such horses reached China, and Wuwei, at the corridor's eastern gate, became an important trading and breeding base for them.

Later generations summed it up in a saying: Liangzhou horses run across the world. Horse-breeding was strategic industry on this frontier — cavalry remounts for the garrison, caravan animals for the road — and it saturated Liangzhou's culture. For Wuwei Television, the heavenly horses connect archaeology to identity: the Leitai bronze, the breeding farms of Han accounts and the horse imagery across the city are chapters of one story the station's history programming can tell from its own ground.

Silk Road garrison city

Wuwei's Han role endured through the dynasties. As Liangzhou it was one of the great frontier commands, a seat of governors and generals guarding the corridor, and a market where the goods of Central Asia changed hands. Its population today is mainly Han, with visible Hui, Mongol and Tibetan communities — a mixture that itself records centuries of corridor traffic, settlement and intermarriage at the meeting point of agricultural China, the steppe and the Tibetan plateau.

The city's Confucian Temple, the Wen Miao, built in the Ming dynasty and first used in 1439, shows the other side of garrison life: a frontier post that was also a place of schools, examinations and scholarship, its temple among the notable survivals of Ming Wuwei. Garrisons needed clerks as well as cavalry, and Liangzhou's literary fame — frontier poems known to every Chinese schoolchild — grew from that double character of sword and brush.

History as a standing programme strand

Few municipal stations anywhere can fill a history strand as Wuwei's can from local material alone: the Leitai tomb and its procession, the galloping horse and the heavenly-horse trade, Liangzhou in Tang poetry, the Ming Confucian temple, the caravanserais and beacon towers of the corridor. The station record's framing — Silk Road garrison themes central to the station's cultural output — reflects a prefecture where heritage is not decoration but the main account the city gives of itself.

That strand also carries responsibilities of accuracy and care. The original bronze is in Lanzhou; Wuwei's task is to keep the discovery site, the tomb and the story vivid at home, and to present new archaeological and conservation work at Leitai Park — its Han culture museum, its temple and its Flying Horse square — as it happens.

Everyday Wuwei and the corridor today

Beyond the heritage map, Wuwei is a working corridor prefecture: oasis agriculture watered from the Qilian mountains, county towns along the highway and railway west, desert-edge communities managing sand and water, and a city centre serving as the eastern service hub of the Hexi Corridor. The main channel's livelihood programming covers that Wuwei — farming, water, transport along the corridor, education and health — for residents whose daily concerns are as practical as any prefecture's.

The two Wuweis meet constantly. A road crew repairing the corridor highway works the same line the caravans walked; a school trip to Leitai starts from a modern classroom. Wuwei Television's schedule, as its record describes it, holds news, history and livelihood together precisely because the prefecture itself does.

Converged media and the prefecture's image

Wuwei's broadcaster now works within the city's converged media centre, producing television with radio and digital services from one organisation. Convergence helps a heritage city present itself consistently — the galloping horse, Leitai, Liangzhou poetry and the Wen Miao are Wuwei's national calling cards, and a converged centre can carry them across broadcast and online platforms together while keeping the main channel focused on residents' news and services.

Why Wuwei Television matters

Wuwei Television matters because Wuwei holds one of China's most famous ancient artworks and the story that goes with it: a garrison city at the eastern gate of the Hexi Corridor, a Han general's tomb found under Leitai in 1969, and a small bronze horse, one hoof on a flying swallow, that became the symbol of tourism for the whole country. The municipal station is where that inheritance meets the modern corridor prefecture — in Mandarin news, history and livelihood programmes made for all of Wuwei.