ABSTRACT
Although they had first been incorporated into the Chinese empire by the first emperor of Qin more than five hundred years earlier, the vast territories south of the Yangzi River confronted northern refugees fleeing the collapse of Western Jin with much that was strange and unfamiliar. In contrast to the densely settled plains through which the Yellow River flowed, the south must have seemed a raw, peripheral, and relatively empty land. Population figures from the middle of the second century AD gave the south only about 35 percent of the registered population of the empire, even though it accounted for considerably more than half of the total land area.1 The southern population gained ground relative to that of the north over the next two centuries, thanks in large part to successive waves of migration, but the south would long continue to be the less populous half of the Chinese ecumene. The Han Chinese inhabitants of this region were not scattered evenly across the face of the land, but were for the most part tightly concentrated in several major centers of population. One of these centers was the region immediately to the southwest of the mouth of the Yangzi, including the rich, well-watered agricultural lands around Lake Tai and Hangzhou Bay. This was the heart of the Wu kingdom during the Three Kingdoms period, and in earlier times it had been the territory of the ancient states of Wu and Yue. The core of Jin’s Yang province, this region had its own landholding elite families and its people spoke a dialect distinct from that of the north. It was here, at Jiankang on the south bank of the great river, that the Jin émigré elite of the early fourth century chose to establish their capital. The other major center was located upstream, where the Han River enters the Yangzi from the north. This region – Jing province for administrative purposes – included a number of important towns such as Jiangling on the Yangzi and Xiangyang on the Han. Also part of Jing province was the well-populated valley of the Xiang River to the south, in what is now Hunan. A lesser center was the area that became known as Jiang province, stretching south from Wuchang and Xunyang (today’s Jiujiang) on the Yangzi past the Boyang Lake to the valley of the Gan River. The distant cities of Panyu (Canton) and Jiaozhi (today’s Hanoi) on the southern side of the Nanling range were less prominent as centers of Han settlement but played
an important role in Chinese trade and other contacts with the peoples of Southeast Asia.
