Jianghan Plain

Jianghan Plain—named for the confluence of the Yangtze and Han rivers—is an alluvial plain located in the middle and south of Hubei, China. It shares the border with Dongtinghu Plain. It has an area of more than 30 thousands square kilometers. The region was once a large wetland, but was gradually colonized by settlers beginning in the Neolithic period.[1] This accelerated when the state of Chu established its capital there in the middle of the 1st millennium BC, and when the Qin and Han states built dikes to protect farmland from seasonal floods.[2] The Jianghan area has been an important food grain region of China since at least the Ming Dynasty.[3]

References

  1. Zhang Chi, “The Qujialing-Shijiahe Culture in the Middle Yangzi River Valley,” in A Companion to Chinese Archaeology, ed. Anne P. Underhill (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 510–34; Rowan K. Flad and Pochan Chen, Ancient Central China: Centers and Peripheries along the Yangzi River (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
  2. Brian Lander, “State Management of River Dikes in Early China: New Sources on the Environmental History of the Central Yangzi Region.” T’oung Pao 100 (2014): 287-324.
  3. Zhang, Jiayan (1 May 2014). Coping with Calamity: Environmental Change and Peasant Response in Central China, 1736-1949. UBC Press. p. 265. ISBN 978-0-7748-2597-9.


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