The Deadly Bats of Wuhan as I Remember Them

The official story of the origin of the COVID-19 virus is that it jumped interspecies from bats to humans at a Wuhan wet market.

As it happens, I have been to a Wuhan wet market. I have done my food shopping there.

I lived and taught in Wuhan back in the early 1990s.

Wet markets are common throughout China, as they are in the Philippines or Korea. Selling exotic species is not. They mostly sell relatively conventional items like fish and chicken. Some of them are live, and slaughtered on the spot. But the most exotic thing I saw at the Wuhan wet market back in 1992 was the turtles. “Foot fish,” they called them.

In Guangdong, people have exotic tastes. It is a common misunderstanding that this is true in China as a whole. The Wuhanites joke: “the people in Guangdong will eat anything with legs except a table, and anything with wings except an airplane.” They do not themselves eat exotics. Not bats, not cats, not pangolins. There are local delicacies we might find weird--sparrows in Shanghai, crickets, thousand-year-old eggs. But these are limited, and familiar. Horseshoe bats, brought in from 900 kilometres away? No. There is no chance such a thing could have become a local specialty. And unheard of in Wuhan when I was there.

On the other hand, we know for a published fact that a high-security virus lab in Wuhan, not far from the wet market, was experimenting with bat coronaviruses.

You do the math.