Chinese people loved adventure just as much as Europeans did; this was no exaggeration. There was a traveler named Xu Xiake who compiled what he had seen and heard on his journeys and published a book called The Travels of Xu Xiake. Whenever he reached a place, he would borrow and consult its local gazetteers. He would grow very displeased whenever he found that their contents overlapped heavily with the Comprehensive Gazetteer of the Ming Dynasty, or when the local gazetteers had not been completed. Some travelers bought local gazetteers during their journeys to aid their sightseeing in the area.
Many travel journals showed that travelers consulted local gazetteers on the road and recorded details of how they used them. When the famous sixteenth-century scholar Zhan Ruoshui traveled through the lower Yangtze River Delta, he once stopped at Yangzhou Prefectural School, where he gave the teachers and students a lecture titled "A gentleman who lacks gravity will not command respect." While explaining his views, he quoted a line excerpted from Yangzhou's local gazetteer: "The local customs are frivolous, hence the name Yangzhou." Zhan Ruoshui then focused on the interpretation of "gravity," believing that a gentleman should use it to cure the flaw of frivolity.
It was not only the petals of poplar blossoms that drifted with the current after falling onto the water, but their frivolous nature had already taken root in people's hearts. Yangzhou's local gazetteers had been repeatedly revised for this very reason, devoting copious space to recording the city's famous sites and historic relics, while gathering a great many archival documents and classical materials through interviews.
Within Yangzhou's inner city ran a stretch of canal once known as the New City River. From the Kangxi era onward, it came to be called Little Qinhuai. Not only did