Wuhan: Gut drones, livestreams and T-Rex

The place seems to have multiple-personality disorder.

It doesn't seem to know who, when or where it is.

But the main question for me is: why?

The answer seems to be: why not?

Still, the shops and restaurants that line the street－think McDonald's, Starbucks and English First－are strangely ... ordinary.

Well, that is, save for a studio people visit to get photos of themselves dressed up as Korean fairy-tale characters.

Afterward, we went to a restaurant that's a garden so expansive that servers wear roller skates not as a gimmick but just to make it across the vast, concrete-paved "forest", resplendent with peacocks, while dishes are still hot.

Indeed, such scenes may be unexpected in central China. A few decades ago, the city was a heavy-manufacturing base. Think metal processing.

But Wuhan's innovative and emerging industries have made it an unlikely model for other inland cities' technological upgrading since it became the home of China's first domestically produced fiber optics three decades ago.

Today, it's one of the world's biggest optic-technology developers.

The latest Yangtze River Economic Belt Plan positions Hubei's capital as a leader to advance city clusters in the waterway's middle reaches.

In other words, its role is to help the Middle Kingdom rise from its center.

Wuhan is called "China's Chicago" because of its importance as a major inland city. And Optics Valley is known as "China's Silicon Valley". (Beijing's Zhongguancun also vies for the title, albeit largely for different reasons.)

Wuhan lives up to these names.

It's a vital link between coastal and inland economies, and a hotbed of technological innovation.

It is, after all, the kind of place where you can operate a belly bot in the morning and sing with a livestreamer at night.