administrative beaucracy, this scholar gentry, overseers of large country estates, residents of the capital of Kaifeng, formed a social elite with the time and means for cultivating discerning aesthetic tastes, including contests for the best tea bowl for frothed white tea, the Hare's Fur bowls of the communal kilns of the farmer-potters of distant Kiangsi province being considered the most beautiful and appropriate.

This figure is also cited in Dardess, A Ming Society: T'aiho County, Kiangsi, in the Fourteenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley, 1996), p.

In China, warm weather crops, such as oranges, were abandoned in Kiangsi Province, where they had been grown for centuries.