Abstract Cross-view retrieval, which focuses on searching images as response to text queries or vice versa, has received increasing attention recently. Crossview hashing is to efficiently solve the cross-view retrieval problem with binary hash codes. Most existing works on cross-view hashing exploit multiview embedding method to tackle this problem, which inevitably causes the information loss in both image and text domains. Inspired by the Generative Adversarial Nets (GANs), this paper presents a new model that is able to Turn Crossview Hashing into single-view hashing (TUCH), thus enabling the information of image to be preserved as much as possible. TUCH is a novel deep architecture that integrates a language model network T for text feature extraction, a generator network G to generate fake images from text feature and a hashing network H for learning hashing functions to generate compact binary codes. Our architecture effectively unifies joint generative adversarial learning and cross-view hashing. Extensive empirical evidence shows that our TUCH approach achieves state-of-the-art results, especially on text to image retrieval, based on imagesentences datasets, i.e. standard IAPRTC-12 and large-scale Microsoft COCO.