Definition of "Jiangnan"

Jiangnan

/d͡ʒɑŋ.nɑn/

proper noun
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.
  Quotations
  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.]
  , New York: George Braziller, 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 social order in which elites, sometimes with local official involvement, created local institutions without vertically integrated bureaucratic oversight appears to have become more common.
  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 University Press, page 320
  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.
  2016 September 27, “The Best Cookbooks of Fall 2016”, in The New York Times‎, archived from the original on 30 September 2016, Cookbooks‎
2. (historical) A province of Qing-era China, now divided into Jiangsu and Anhui.
  Quotations
  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.]
  , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, page 13