Chinese Studies Advanced Guide

Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖 (Complete Geographical Map of Ten Thousand Countries), is the oldest surviving map in Chinese to show the Americas. It is a xylograph (wood block print) on six panels of fine native paper (made with bamboo fiber), each panel measuring approximately 608.33 mm x 1820 mm (2 feet by 5.75 feet). Li Zhizao (1565-1630), a Chinese mathematician, astronomer and geographer, who worked on the project with Ricci, may have engraved the map. It was printed by Zhang Wentao of Hangzhou, possibly an official printer of the Ming court.

This collection consists of more than 180 maps, charts, pictures and atlases. It has samples of almost all maps of China produced by European cartographers from the 16th to 19th centuries, vividly recording the long history of cross-cultural exchanges between China and the West. By the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

A database of information, maps, drawings, prints and paintings of locations related to the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC) and the Dutch West India Company (West-Indische Compagnie, WIC). It contains 118 images of Chinese maps.

The Big Ten Academic Alliance Geoportal provides discoverability and facilitates access to geospatial resources. The resources in the portal are selected and curated by librarians and geospatial specialists at ten research institutions in the Big Ten Academic Alliance. The resources include GIS datasets, web services, and digitized historical maps. Learn more about the research institutions involved and the sources of the geospatial records.

The main objective of the CHGIS project is to create a flexible tool, in the form of a documented database of places and administrative units in China, which can be used to investigate any sort of geographically specific data related to the country.

More than 1000 Chinese Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) maps from the UMN East Asian collection.

CHMap provides quick access to 4,088 land survey maps of China produced by either China’s central and provincial governments or the land survey department of the Japanese Army during the late 19th and the early 20th centuries. They are the first maps that provide accurate and large-scale outlooks (1:50,000) to a wide geography of proper China. In CHMap, users can access these land survey maps digitized by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and hosted at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, as well as those hosted at Academia Sinica.

A collection of historical maps of China from the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

The collection from the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford college libraries include some images of rare books, manuscripts, and other treasures from East Asia.

The Library of Congress houses hundreds of original hand-drawn survey maps of the Chinese continent and the Korean Peninsula created by Japanese Army officers in the 1880s. This database provides images of these maps.
To browse the collection, please enter "agree" in the textbox and click the button "閲覧する"

Digital historical maps of Manchukuo.

This is a map collection from Harvard University. Most of the maps have free online access. It covers the maps of China, Japan, Korea, & Vietnam

The Library of Congress has a large collection of maps from China, 560 of which have been made available for viewing online. They are dated from 1500 to the present.

OldMapsOnline developed out of a love of history and heritage of old maps. The project began as a collaboration between Klokan Technologies GmbH, Switzerland and The Great Britain Historical GIS Project based at the University of Portsmouth, UK.

A collection of historical maps of China held by Perry-Castañeda Library at the University of Texas at Austin. Links to recent maps and map data portals are also available on this page.

This is a map project developed by the Academia Sinica. It contains thousands of Chinese maps dated before 1949, not only held in Taiwan (most of them were taken to Taiwan before 1949), but also maps held in the Academy of Science, Japan.

A collection of western maps mostly on China acquired by the Toyo Bunko in 1917. It also includes some maps on Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia and Asia.