Abstract:

“Jiangnan （The south of the Yangtze River） with the virtues of water” is concrete abstraction, a theoretical discourse with the nature of openness and personal experience. It is also the crystallization of ideas in terms of ecology, production, life, and philosophy, produced in the long-term interactivity between humans and land with regional characteristics. It is a miniature Chinese regional morphology and aesthetics with theoretical features such as non-dualism, non-systematism, literary-historical interaction and the integration of the Dao and art. How to integrate literature, language, history, people, philosophy, art, religion, geography, and hydrology into one furnace to grasp Jiangnan without appealing to a system of abstract categories? How to connect ancient and modern times, activate the Jiangnan learning and articles into the truth, poetry and temperament that can be recognized in everyone’s life and exist in people’s daily life without realizing them? These questions cannot be ignored in any attempts to construct the theory of Jiangnan cultural poetics.

Key words: virtues of water, rigid and soft, life and death, clear and turbid, tolerant and intolerant