Jiangnan

Proper noun

Jiangnan

1. A roughly defined area of China always including the lands south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze in Shanghai, southern Jiangsu, and northern Zhejiang, sometimes inclusive of its cultural sphere north of the river and sometimes extending south as far as Guangdong.
   • They traveled northeast along the Hsiang River, on foot and by boat, then turned east from northern Hunan into Kiangsi and Anhwei, reaching the heart of the Chiangnan region (south of the Yangtze River). For the next ten years they journeyed all over Chiangnan, stopping at the famous religious...[1976, Wen Fong, “Introduction: Mountains and Rivers Remain”, in Returning Home: Tao-chi's Album of Landscapes and Flowers, New York: George Braziller, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC, page 16
   • Jiangnan elites were those least affected by the bureaucratic changes of the eighteenth century; the shared agenda of local order was met by elites in Jiangnan with little official intervention, even in the eighteenth century. When the eighteenth-century system fell apart, a Jiangnan style of...1997, R. Bin Wong, “Confucian Agendas for Material and Ideological Control in Modern China”, in Culture & State in Chinese History: Conventions, Accommodations, and Critiques, Stanford, CA: Stanford...
2. (historical) A province of Qing-era China, now divided into Jiangsu and Anhui.
   • The reason Hunan’s rich soils did not produce rice yields to match those of the “barren” lands of Fukien and Chekiang was because manpower was scarce in Hunan. Rice could not be grown with the same care found in the two densely populated Chiangnan provinces.[1972, “Conditions of Rice Culture: Labor Requirements and Land Tenure”, in Agricultural Change and the Peasant Economy of South China, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, →ISBN, →LCCN...
   • The term underwent several stages of modification in the period between Tang and Qing; in the first part of the Qing it was briefly revived as the name of Jiangnan province, but in province form Jiangnan lasted only a short while, for in the Kangxi reign it was divided again into the two modern...1993, “Preface”, in Linda Cooke Johnson, editor, Cities of Jiangnan in Late Imperial China (SUNY Series in Chinese Local Studies), Albany: State University of New York Press, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC...