Jiangnan

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 shrines and scenic sites.

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 social order in which elites, sometimes with local official involvement, created local institutions without vertically integrated bureaucratic oversight appears to have become more common.

For her latest, Fuchsia Dunlop, a British cook and food writer who has been studying Chinese cooking since the mid-1990s, dives deep into the balanced flavors of Jiangnan, the region in eastern China that includes the nation’s largest city, Shanghai.

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.

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 entities of Anhui and Jiangsu.