At the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth, the Tai Lake basin in eastern China was brimming with talent, and many masterful figures were born there, much as had been the case in the Poyang Lake basin during the Song dynasty. It is no exaggeration to say that more than half of the literary and scientific giants of modern China came from this region, which today we accustomed to referring to as the Yangtze River Delta, although this mainly reflects an economic perspective, associating it with the Pearl River Delta, the first frontier of reform and opening-up. From the perspective of historical and cultural origins, there is no question that this region is more closely related to Tai Lake than to the Yangtze River. On the northern and southern shores of the lake, respectively, there are the six cities of the Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou metropolitan area in Jiangsu province and Hangzhou, Jiaxing, and Huzhou in Zhejiang. These six cities belonged to the Liangzhe Circuit of the Song dynasty, representing the land of fish and rice popular among the Chinese people and also the beautiful Jiangnan held in esteem in the poems of the literati.