Suzhou and the lower Yangzi River region, central to the material and intellectual life of the Chinese empire in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, have proved almost as fertile for today's China scholars as they have long been for Chinese farmers. By the late imperial period, many farmers in the region had shifted from rice and wheat production to cotton and silk, and had grown rich in the process. New sources of wealth unsettled old social strata. At the same time, a burgeoning publishing trade gave more people access to education, the traditional route to official power by way of the civil service examinations.
