Yi Ming

Such a social atmosphere of extravagance also reflected in scholar-officials’ daily practices of tea consumption and water drinking. Water delivery was widely accepted and practiced by scholar-official tea connoisseurs in the late-Ming era. Tian Yiheng has explained the way in which drinkers should deliver the spring water from the Mount Hui in the Zhu quan xiao pin, and he suggested that drinkers should send honest servants to fulfill this job so that they would not bring bad water from any places nearby. Another active practitioner of water delivery was Li Rihua (1565-1635), a scholar-official from Jiaxing, which was a prefecture considered as a hinge between Suzhou and Hangzhou along the Grand Canal. As soon as Li received his jinshi degree in the year of 1592, he became a friend of the Xiang family, which was the most influential and wealthiest family in town, based upon their common obsessions with the collection of paintings. The distance between Jiaxing and the Mount Hui was around 300 li by water, which usually took the travelers three or four days to arrive at the other
Da ming yi tong zhi (Gazetteer of the Unity of the Great Ming), a gazetteer which was completed in 1456, had already described Jiaxing as an affluent and prosperous area, where “all soil in the Wu region is supreme fertile. (Jiaxing has the most fertile land in the Wu region. Therefore, once Jiaxing has a good harvest, the Jianghuai region would be abundant; if Jiaxing has a bad year, the whole region must behave frugally.) It attracts people with the profit of fishery and salt… Residents are intelligent, gentle, and are substantially rich.” Generally speaking, an advantageous geographical location and the rich endowment of natural resources has made Jiaxing a wealthy town, which laid a foundation for its continuous growth of commerce and