Jiangxi's river valley was southern China's highway for two thousand years
Southeast China is a jumble of rugged mountains, but one river valley cuts cleanly through them. For centuries the Gan River corridor in Jiangxi carried trade and armies between the Yangtze and the far south, making this inland province strategically vital long before it became the cradle of Chinese communism.
Jiangxi stretches from the Yangtze's banks in the north to hills and mountains in the south and east, bordered by six provinces including Fujian, Guangdong and Hunan. Its capital is Nanchang. The south is broken country of ranges and valleys, home to Mount Lu, the Jinggang Mountains and Mount Sanqing, while the north lies lower. Most residents are Han Chinese, yet the province is linguistically varied: it is the heartland of Gan Chinese, and Hakka is spoken too. Underground it is exceptionally rich, leading China's provinces in deposits of copper, tungsten, gold, silver, uranium and lithium, among other minerals.
Early Chinese states barely reached it. During the Shang dynasty the region lay outside their orbit and was probably home to peoples known as the Baiyue. The northern part later sat on the western edge of the state of Wu, then passed to Chu after 473 BC, and Qin absorbed the area in 223 BC. The first lasting commandery, Yuzhang, was founded at the start of the Han dynasty and named after the river's original name; over the Han its counties grew to eighteen, covering most of today's province. The short form Gan, still used for Jiangxi, comes from the river.
The modern name is a Tang legacy. In 733 the vast Jiangnan Circuit, meaning south of the Yangtze, was split in two, and Jiangxi fell into the western half, Jiangnanxi. After the Tang collapsed in 907 the area belonged successively to the kingdoms of Wu and Southern Tang, both ruled from Nanjing, before a province of Jiangxi was eventually created with roughly its present borders.
In the twentieth century the province took on new symbolism. The Nanchang uprising of 1 August 1927 opened the Chinese Civil War, and in 1931 the Chinese Soviet Republic set up its government at Ruijin, still nicknamed the Former Red Capital.
Source: Jiangxi
