The Tang Dynasty (618-907) ended a 300-year tumult in which short-lived dynasties rose and fell. The new dynasty’s prosperity and peace made it possible for people to travel across the country freely. In the Tang, travelers moved largely in two directions. For some, the west border was their destination where they braved challenges and hardships in a bid to cut a brilliant figure in military campaigns. In the opposite direction, poets traveled southward to visit Jiangnan, a general name for the region south of the Yangtze River.

Jiangnan in the history changed its geographic definition several times. Even today, where Jiangnan is still blurs. For many people of today, Jiangnan refers only to a region that includes the south of Jiangsu and north of Zhejiang and Shanghai in between. But for the weather forecasters at CCTV, China’s largest television network, Jiangnan is much broader. Jiangnan in CCTV weather forecasts includes a wide area extending to Hunan, Anhui and Jiangxi along the Yangtze River in present-day central and eastern China. It coincides with the Jiangnan in the Tang, as testified by numerous poems written in the dynasty.

Poets of the Tang were fascinated by Jiangnan largely because the poets of the six dynasties from the third century to the sixth century in the south wrote nature poems. These poems are unusual in the history of Chinese poetry. They were nature poems, unseen and unheard of before and they portrayed a gorgeous beauty of nature unseen and unheard of before. In the three hundred years before the Tang, the best known poets largely lived in the south. A book written in the Sui Dynasty (581-617) records a list of literary masters: 16 from the north and 306 from the south. The Sui Dynasty and the Tang Dynasty shifted the political and economic and cultural center back to the north, but the poems written by the poets in the south remained fascinating.

Their poems impacted Tang poets. They wished to take a look at the natural and cultural wonders of the south and traveled southward largely by the Grand Canal which in the Tang Dynasty connected Luoyang in present-day Henan Province and Hangzhou in Zhejiang. Almost all the important poets of the Tang visited Jiangnan, that is, the Jiangnan of today. For example, Wang Bo started his south journey at age 25. Du Fu, one of the greatest poets of the Tang, traveled through Jiangnan at the age of 20. Meng Haoran visited Jiangnan at 41. Li Bai tripped through Jiangnan three times in his lifetime. Their visits to the south gave birth to poems that depict river journeys, goodbyes, and adventures. , put together in 1705 to 1706 by scholars of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), counts 244 poems about Jiangnan including 25 titled .

In the Tang Dynasty, the development of China was still uneven. The north was culturally dominant. In the 289 years of the Tang Dynasty, the north produced 308 prime ministers whereas the south contributed only 54. Most scholars in the north were highly curious about the poems written about Jiangnan by the poets in the 300 years prior to the Tang. These poems offered an insight into the scenic south that appeared celestially beautiful. So poets from the north came to visit the south and wrote poems that outshone those by their processors and have come down to us today. The poems about Jiangnan written in the Tang romanticized the region and combined to turn it into a legendary Shangri-La: peace, prosperity, home for heart and soul, spectacular and lyrical nature, rural beauty, springtime, Zen, wild dreams, boats, lotuses, wine, silk, flowers, mountains and rivers and ponds, the moon, beautiful women.