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Jiangnan is a geographic area in China referring to lands immediately to the south of the lower reaches of the Yangtze, including the southern part of its Yangtze Delta. The region encompasses the city of Shanghai, the southern part of Jiangsu Province, the southeastern part of Anhui Province, the northern part of Jiangxi Province and Zhejiang Province. The most important cities in the area include Anqing, Changzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing, Ningbo, Shaoxing, Suzhou, Wuxi, Wenzhou, Yangzhou and Zhenjiang.
Jiangnan has long been regarded as one of the most prosperous regions in China due to its wealth in trade and very high human development. Most people of the region speak Wu Chinese dialects as their native languages.
In older and non-standard romanization systems, Jiangnan was historically written as Chiang-nan,Cf. Wade-Giles romanization. Kiangnan,. and Keang-nan in English and other European languages.
Although Chinese civilization originated in the North China Plain around the Yellow River, natural climate change and continuous harassment from nomadic enemies damaged North China's agricultural productivity throughout the 1st millennium AD. Many people settled in South China, where the Jiangnan area's warm and wet climate were ideal for supporting agriculture and allowed highly sophisticated cities to arise. As early as the Eastern Han dynasty (circa 2nd century AD), Jiangnan areas became one of the more economically prominent areas of China. Other than rice, Jiangnan produced highly profitable trade products such as tea, silk, and celadon porcelain (from Shangyu). Convenient transportation – the Grand Canal to the north, the Yangtze River to the west, and seaports such as Yangzhou – contributed greatly to local trade and also trade between ancient China and other nations.
Several Chinese dynasties were based in Jiangnan. After the Qin dynasty fell, the insurgent state of Chu took control. Its ruler, Xiang Yu, was born here. During the Three Kingdoms period, Jianye (present-day Nanjing) was the capital of Eastern Wu. In the 3rd century, many northern Chinese moved here after nomadic groups controlled the north. In the 10th century, Wuyue was a small coastal kingdom founded by Qian Liu who made a lasting cultural impact on Jiangnan and its people to this day. After the Jurchen people completely overran northern China in the Jin–Song war of the 1120s, the exiled Song dynasty government retreated south, establishing the new Southern Song capital at Hangzhou in 1127.
During the last years of the Yuan dynasty, Jiangnan was fought for by two major rebel states: Zhu Yuanzhang's Ming dynasty, based in Nanjing, and the Suzhou-centered Wu faction led by Zhang Shicheng. A ten-year rivalry ended with Zhu's capture of Suzhou in 1367; having thus reunified Jiangnan, Zhu proclaimed himself the first emperor of the Ming dynasty on Chinese New Year's Day (20 January) of 1368, and a few months later expelled the Mongols from Northern China as well. Nanjing remained the capital of the Ming dynasty until the early 15th century, when the third Ming ruler, the Yongle Emperor, moved the capital to Beijing.
When the Qing dynasty first took over China, they renamed the "Nanzhili" around the Ming's southern capital Nanjing to be their Jiangnan Province, which was later divided into the separate provinces of Jiangsu and Anhui overseen by the Viceroy of Liangjiang. Besides assisting the Southern Ming as long as possible, Jiangnan's gentry offered initial resistance to the Manchu people Qing by interrupting tax collection in the area..
The Qianlong Emperor of the Qing dynasty made many visits to Jiangnan (), which have been the popular subject of numerous and television dramas. Earlier, the Kangxi Emperor visited the region as well. Jiangnan, specifically Shaoxing, was actually the southern terminus of Kangxi's so-called Southern Inspection Tour.
During the 19th century Taiping Rebellion, the regime established by the Taiping rebels occupied much of Jiangnan and eventually made Nanjing its capital. The area suffered much damage as the rebellion was quelled and Qing imperial rule restored.
After the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911, and Chiang Kai-shek's Northern Expedition, the Republic of China (ROC), following the wishes of Sun Yat-sen, made Nanjing the national capital. From the late 1920s until the Second World War, the Jiangnan area was the focus of Chinese economic development. Much of the Kuomintang's ruling elite and the ROC's economic elite hailed from the Jiangnan area.
In Yangzhou, the Yangzhou massacre during the transition from Ming dynasty to Qing dynasty has resulted in drastic decline of Wu speaking population in the city and the demographic change eventually made Taihu Wu dialects extinct in Yangzhou, while Jianghuai Mandarin becomes the more prominent dialect since then. This also made Yangzhou no longer perceived as part of Jiang Nan by some of the Wu speaking population. In the Jiangnan region itself, multiple subdialects of Wu Chinese fought for the position of the prestige dialect.
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