Tōngtài

The Tōngtài culture occupies the coastal lowland of central Jiangsu between the Grand Canal and the sea, centred on Taizhou, the old Hailing, and Tongzhou in Nantong; its Tong-Tai or Tai-Ru speech is the easternmost branch of Jianghuai Mandarin. The country had once been Wu-speaking, and when Wu families were resettled into eastern Jiangsu in the early Ming, their speech met the Jianghuai koiné and left a thick Wu substrate, especially around Rugao. Its dialects fall into western, middle and eastern groups that differ chiefly in their consonants.

Life here was shaped by the advancing coast: Yangtze silt raised new land and tidal salt pans, and the Hailing salt administration, already set up under the Tang, made Taizhou a hub of the Lianghuai salt trade through the Ming and Qing.

In 1526 the salt-worker-turned-scholar Wang Gen lectured at Anding Academy and founded the populist Taizhou School of Confucian thought, the region's best-known contribution to Ming philosophy.