Stretched between the Yangzi in the north and a mountainous border with Guangdong in the south, China Jiangxi Province has always been a bit of a backwater. Though inhabited for some four thousand years, the first major influx of settlers came as late as the Han dynasty, when its interior offered sanctuary for those dislodged by warfare. The northern half benefited most from these migrants, who began to farm the great plain around China's largest freshwater lake, Poyang Hu . A network of rivers covering the province drains into Poyang, and when the construction of the Grand Canal created a route through Yangzhou and the lower Yangzi in the seventh century, Jiangxi's capital, Nanchang , became a key point on the great north-south link of inland waterways. Then the region enjoyed a long period of quiet prosperity, until coastal shipping and the opening up of treaty ports took business away in the 1840s. The next century saw a complete reversal of Jiangxi's fortunes: the population halved as millions fled competing warlords and, during the 1920s and 1930s, protracted fighting between the Guomindang and Communist forces were concentrated in the southern Jinggang Shan ranges, which eventually led to an evicted Red Army starting on their Long March across China.

Despite the troubles, things picked up quickly after the Communist takeover, and a badly battered Nanchang licked its wounds and reinvented itself as a revolutionary city and centre of modern heavy industry. More traditionally, access provided by Poyang and the Yangzi tributaries benefit the hilly areas to the east, where Jingdezhen retains its title as China's porcelain capital. North of the lake, Jiujiang is a key Yangzi port on the doorsteps of Anhui and Hubei, while the nearby mountain area of Lu Shan offers a pleasant reminder of Jiangxi's better days, having long been a summer retreat for Chinese literati and colonial servants.