We distinguish between the dynastic empires, referred to as "Dynasties," and the various independent states and confederations on the borders of those empires, referred to as "Regimes."

All the administrative units that were subordinate to a Dynasty are defined with unique spatial objects down to the county level. All changes over time for each type of administrative unit are tracked as separate objects in the same GIS layer. For every change in placename, administrative status, or location, a new spatial object is added to the dataset. Each one of these spatial objects represents an administrative unit which existed for a known period of time, and therefore has a beginning and ending year. The span of time defined by the beginning and ending years is called an "historical instance."

For county level units and higher, each change is recorded as a point, showing the location of the administrative office. For prefectures and higher level units, boundary changes are recorded as polygons, which show the area under the supervision of those administrative units for each historical instance. The relationships between particular administrative areas and their respective administrative seats are not recorded in the GIS layers, but are defined in the accompanying CHGIS Relational Database (PartOf Table).

Because the GIS layers contain the complete sequence of historical spatial objects, you as the user must sort or query the data by year if you want to use them in the same way as you would use the customary "single-time value" GIS data. This is relatively easy to do. See the Time Series page for more information on making use of the Time Series GIS Data.

Separate point and polygon GIS layers are provided for provinces, prefectures, and counties. An additional 8,000 towns and villages are provided as a point layer.

The V3 1820 datasets have not been revised from V2, and are reposted here with the same filenames as the previous version. Spatial objects in the V3 1820 datasets retain the same SYSTEM_ID number that was used for them in previous versions.

New with V4 are Coded Rivers, assigned Strahler Stream Orders by Mark Henderson.

[1820 images show 1820 Qing Provinces as background]

ChinaW Dataset Points
Physiographic Macroregions

Authors: G. William Skinner, Zumou Yue, and Mark Henderson.

Separate point and polygon GIS layers are provided for provinces, prefectures, and counties. An additional 38,000 towns and villages are provided as a point layer. The 1911 datasets were reconstructed from county level and prefectural level maps, dating from the end of the Qing Dynasty and early Republican Period. See the Compilation of CHGIS Datasets page for a full description of the process used to create the 1911 CHGIS datasets.

[1911 images show 1820 Qing Provinces as background]

Separate polygon GIS layers are provided for provinces, prefectures, and counties. See the CHGIS China Dimensions page for a full description of the CITAS datasets.

V4 County layers include statistical data from the 1990 census! See Counties description for details.

New for Version 4 are more than 140,000 U.S. GeoNames Database features, enhanced with parent jurisdiction information. All of the China placename features (including towns, administrative units, and natural features) have been stamped with their parent county names, prefecture names, and national standard code numbers (GuoBiao Codes) for those parent jurisdictions. The resulting files have been split into thirty separate layers, one for each Chinese Province (circa 1990).

Chinese Characters are included for County level units only (GBK encoding).

This data is derived from public domain GNS data, published by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (please consult GNS_COPYRIGHT statement, included with each layer).

In 1997 the Province Level Municipality of Chongqing Shi was carved out of the eastern half of Sichuan Province. For the convenience of those wishing to represent PRC China Provinces from 1997 to present, we have created an unofficial Province level dataset with the post-97 areas of Sichuan Sheng and Chongqing Shi defined separately.

Disclaimer: this is not an official version of the Sichuan and Chongqing boundaries, use at your own risk.

Users may download one large image for the entire area of coverage (12 MB), or the DEM data in GeoTiff format, allowing for reclassification of color values by elevation or other types of analysis (65 MB).

See also links to Related Projects and Tabular Datasets available on the CHGIS website.