The WebGIS Platform of Historical Maps of China, conducted by the history department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University (SJTUMAPGIS), is a combined GIS system and historical scholarship on historical maps of China to geo-reference scanned maps by ArcGIS and release them for public use. This is an open and nonprofit platform for sharing resources on Chinese historical maps.
This project first focused on military maps of premodern China. All maps are scanned at high resolution (600dpi), and then geo-referenced. The WebGIS platform now contains 4,088 maps, taken from《中国大陸五万分の一地図集成》Maps of China (The Scale of a One to Fifty Thousand) (Tokyo, 2002). These maps were charted in the late nineteenth century for military purposes, covering nineteen major provinces of the main territory of China—Fujian, Guangdong, Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, Hainan, Hebei, Hubei, Hunan, Jiangsu, Jiangxi, Liaoning, Shanxi, Zhejiang, Anhui, Henan, Inner Mengolia, Shaanxi, and Sichuan—with geographic elements such as cities, villages, rivers, lakes, and mountains in great detail.
The project aims to set up visualized and analyzable spatio-temporal layers on the WebGIS platform. For further project expansion, more detailed maps would be introduced and geo-referenced, including 1:25,000 scale maps nationwide and other compatible regional series maps.
