Inland urban lakes are important components of urban wetland, and they are greatly affected by the disturbance of human activities; while the conditions of urban lakes also affect the sustainable development of cities. This study aimed to analyse the dynamic changes of major lakes in Wuhan City from a landscape perspective using nine Landsat images(including three Landsat MSS images, five Landsat 5 TM images and one Landsat 8 image). Remote sensing and geographic information systems technologies were firstly used to extract lakes from the images, and suitable landscape matrices were then selected by applying principal component analysis. Four landscape matrices were selected for qualifying the dynamic changes, including the mean patch size(MPS), standard deviation of patch size(PSSD), edge density(ED) and mean patch fractal dimension number(MPDF). The results showed that the lake change of Wuhan had four stages:(1) during the 1970s, total area of the lake, MPS and PSSD reduced drastically; while patch number(especially the number of small lakes) increased dramatically, which indicated that big lakes fragmented into small lakes mainly due to the guide of “Reclaim the land” policy;(2) during the 1980s, the implementation of “Returning farming land to lakes” policy caused an increase in the total area of the lakes, but the small lakes were dying out seriously during that period;(3) during the 1990s, due to the development of economy and the growth of population, the problem of the shortage of land arose. The lakes suffered from the overexploitation again, and the surface area of lakes reduced with fluctuation;(4) since 21st century, lakes patches continued to increase slowly in numbers, while the total area of the lake showed a decreasing trend, which indicated that big lakes fragmented or broken into small lakes. We concluded that the lakes of Wuhan city were greatly influenced by the human activities and policies, and that the scientific management of lakes should be carried out for keeping the lakes under rational developments and for protecting these valuable natural resources.