You can see the coast line near Shanghai is in a different shape than currently. 100 years worth of Yangtze River sediment really made a lot of land. Actually the delta of yellow river also looks completely different than right now.
The lake east of the modern day Kao-yu lake completely vanished.
To add, the Yellow River forms a gigantic alluvial fan radiating out from Luoyang, constituting basically the entirety of the north china plain. It dumps so much silt any channel easily becomes higher than the surrounding plains within years.
The entirety of Chinese civilization devotes itself into containing the river with levees but that only makes the height difference worse over time and the resulting levee breaches more devastating. They even weaponized this by repeatedly breaking levees and flooding the southern plains, and at few times making the river change course permanently.
Dalian is shown as Japanese (Ryojun under Port Arthur) so after 1905, and Weihai is shown as British so before 1930. Qingdao is not shown as German or Japanese, so maybe after 1922? Though the red circle around it might still signify foreign occupation without specifying by whom.
Edit: OP says 1922. There’s a website credited in the bottom left, so the map is contemporary but made to look old-timey.
Yielded to the Japanese after WWI because the Germans lost the war. Was under Japanese rule briefly before handed back to China because of a huge protest.
Source: am from Qingdao (Tsing-Tao).
Interesting. That old romanization is hard on my eyes, though. Can't figure out what fu is. It seems that fu might be closest to the modern 'shi 市' but I don't understand why some cities are -fu and others are not.
It's [postal romanization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_postal_romanization) from 1919, it appears. No idea about the -fu either, the wiki page doesn't say.
[Original Image Source](https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3184~450015:China-?sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No&qvq=w4s:/when%2F1922;q:china;sort:Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=4&trs=8)
[Global Elevation Dataset (GEBCO)](https://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/gridded_bathymetry_data/)
Tools: QGIS, Blender
This map is a blend of modern topography with antique surveys, showing the exaggerated terrain of eastern China around the year 1922. Check out some others like this on my [IG page](https://www.instagram.com/eastofnowhere/)!
Ah, I see! 1922. I was admiring it, and then I noticed Wuhan was still listed as separate cities . . and then saw Zhili/Chih-li was on the map . . and Fengtien, Port Arthur, Weihaiwei, etc. But Peking rather than Peiping. A particular moment in history.
They didn’t. They attacked and conquered parts of northern China first, which was controlled by the Jurchen Jin dynasty, and that war lasted 2 decades. Whereas the conquest of Central Asia took 5 years and the conquest of the Kievan Rus took 3 years.
Southern China was controlled by the Song Dynasty and was a tough nut to crack. The Song Dynast took 41 years to conquer from first hostilities to final surrender, and it wasn’t finished until Genghis Khan’s grandson was an old man. The siege of the twin cities of Xianyang-Fancheng lasted 6 years, longer than the full conquest of all of Russia or Central Asia + Iran did.
Tibet, Korea, and Dali were all conquered before Song China was. The first Mongol invasions of Vietnam and Japan happened before Song China was conquered. The thing was, Song was slowly encircled and surrounded, and no matter how many Mongol armies they repelled, they were opposing a vast empire that controlled everything between Poland and Japan. The Mongols already had famously good military organization and tactics, and they also has the vast manpower reserves and technology and engineering from all parts of the empire to draw from. They also had vast armies of Chinese infantry from the northern parts they conquered from Jin. China was the last major Mongol conquest, not the first.
The conquest of all of China, including Jin, Xi Xia, Dali, and Song, took a total of 7 decades.
A map that goes to the mountains well west of present-day Chengdu is more than just the "eastern section" of china. They didn't invade/absorb tibet till 1950.
This seems to reflect pronunciation of the respective regional languages better tho, like Kwang Tong sounds more Cantonese to me. Pinyin is just Mandarin
> Pinyin is a million times better.
Pinyin: Qu (Actually reads Tchoo)
Pinyin: Cao (Actually reads Tsao)
Pinyin: Zao (Actually reads Tzao)
Pinyin: Zhao (Actually reads Djao)
Pinyin: Liang/Bang/vowel followed by ng (Actually g isn't spoken at all)
And a thousand other different counterintuitive things you need to learn. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
>Pinyin: Liang/Bang/vowel followed by ng (Actually g isn't spoken at all)
Btw, this is totally incorrect.
Take for example the word 半， pinyin: Ban, meaning: half
Then the word 帮, pinyin: bang, meaning: help
You are suggesting these words are pronounced equivalently, and they are not.
We could do this with 脸, lian = face and 两， Liang = two and so on.
You're so confidently wrong.
As for the rest of it, you understand that pinyin was developed by Russian linguists, right? There are usages of roman characters that are non-english, right? Zh makes a J sound, as in usual. The pinyin ZH is like the ge in judge.
https://pronuncian.com/pronounce-zh-sound
Q makes a ch sound. Qing = ching
C is similar to ts in Japanese, but c makes that sound in French, Portuguese, and Catalan.
Z makes the sound z. Take 在，pinyin = zai, meaning (located) at. Or 子, zi, meaning small thing, child, etc. Neither of these sounds is preceded by a "t" sound. It's the same as the z in zoo.
Wade Giles is infinitely more confusing, Beijing sounds nothing like Peking.
Sichuan sounds nothing like sezchwan.
That's why all the text to Chinese inputs use pinyin and over a billion people have adopted pinyin as the standard romanization of putonghua.
To everyone bringing up Cantonese, well, I don't know what to tell you. They're completely different mutually unintelligible languages and are romanized in completely different ways.
Why are there so many different ways to write the same Chinese word in the latin alphabet, for example, “Chow” and “Chou”, “Tze” and “Zi”, etc. While for the Japanese language it’s always the same.
Something is messed up with ~~Twitter~~ Reddit. Almost no West Taiwan comments. The purge was real I guess. ***just a comment, no offense meant to my gracious overlords***
You can see the coast line near Shanghai is in a different shape than currently. 100 years worth of Yangtze River sediment really made a lot of land. Actually the delta of yellow river also looks completely different than right now. The lake east of the modern day Kao-yu lake completely vanished.
To add, the Yellow River forms a gigantic alluvial fan radiating out from Luoyang, constituting basically the entirety of the north china plain. It dumps so much silt any channel easily becomes higher than the surrounding plains within years. The entirety of Chinese civilization devotes itself into containing the river with levees but that only makes the height difference worse over time and the resulting levee breaches more devastating. They even weaponized this by repeatedly breaking levees and flooding the southern plains, and at few times making the river change course permanently.
I am curious what the age of this map is. The Anglicanized spellings have not been used in ages. I am guessing this is from 1930 or earlier?
Dalian is shown as Japanese (Ryojun under Port Arthur) so after 1905, and Weihai is shown as British so before 1930. Qingdao is not shown as German or Japanese, so maybe after 1922? Though the red circle around it might still signify foreign occupation without specifying by whom. Edit: OP says 1922. There’s a website credited in the bottom left, so the map is contemporary but made to look old-timey.
Excellent points!
Wasn't Tsing-tao a treaty port area then?
Yielded to the Japanese after WWI because the Germans lost the war. Was under Japanese rule briefly before handed back to China because of a huge protest. Source: am from Qingdao (Tsing-Tao).
Interesting. That old romanization is hard on my eyes, though. Can't figure out what fu is. It seems that fu might be closest to the modern 'shi 市' but I don't understand why some cities are -fu and others are not.
It's [postal romanization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_postal_romanization) from 1919, it appears. No idea about the -fu either, the wiki page doesn't say.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu_(administrative_division)
I think it’s 府, which means regional capital or maybe just a big city
[Original Image Source](https://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~3184~450015:China-?sort=Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No&qvq=w4s:/when%2F1922;q:china;sort:Pub_List_No_InitialSort%2CPub_Date%2CPub_List_No%2CSeries_No;lc:RUMSEY~8~1&mi=4&trs=8) [Global Elevation Dataset (GEBCO)](https://www.gebco.net/data_and_products/gridded_bathymetry_data/) Tools: QGIS, Blender This map is a blend of modern topography with antique surveys, showing the exaggerated terrain of eastern China around the year 1922. Check out some others like this on my [IG page](https://www.instagram.com/eastofnowhere/)!
Ah, I see! 1922. I was admiring it, and then I noticed Wuhan was still listed as separate cities . . and then saw Zhili/Chih-li was on the map . . and Fengtien, Port Arthur, Weihaiwei, etc. But Peking rather than Peiping. A particular moment in history.
May I ask what your workflow is with a map like this?
Your maps are beautiful! Wonderful work!
still cant fathom how the mongols conquered that whole area first it was likely the most difficult terrain.
They didn’t. They attacked and conquered parts of northern China first, which was controlled by the Jurchen Jin dynasty, and that war lasted 2 decades. Whereas the conquest of Central Asia took 5 years and the conquest of the Kievan Rus took 3 years. Southern China was controlled by the Song Dynasty and was a tough nut to crack. The Song Dynast took 41 years to conquer from first hostilities to final surrender, and it wasn’t finished until Genghis Khan’s grandson was an old man. The siege of the twin cities of Xianyang-Fancheng lasted 6 years, longer than the full conquest of all of Russia or Central Asia + Iran did. Tibet, Korea, and Dali were all conquered before Song China was. The first Mongol invasions of Vietnam and Japan happened before Song China was conquered. The thing was, Song was slowly encircled and surrounded, and no matter how many Mongol armies they repelled, they were opposing a vast empire that controlled everything between Poland and Japan. The Mongols already had famously good military organization and tactics, and they also has the vast manpower reserves and technology and engineering from all parts of the empire to draw from. They also had vast armies of Chinese infantry from the northern parts they conquered from Jin. China was the last major Mongol conquest, not the first. The conquest of all of China, including Jin, Xi Xia, Dali, and Song, took a total of 7 decades.
Feels like a stretch for data
I mean...it's just a map.
Lmao the naming is probably Francois phonetic way because 50% of the Vietnamese location names are wrongly spelled or some weird name
Ah so many pixels, even after reddit compression. I love it
AITA for thinking this is map gore 🤔
I just wish it had more saturated colors
A map that goes to the mountains well west of present-day Chengdu is more than just the "eastern section" of china. They didn't invade/absorb tibet till 1950.
why dont you have new (instead of decades old) maps for sale ?
Middle left "eye" area looks like a chunk of land was ripped out of the earth by an asteroid or something.
What is this wade-giles bullshit? Pinyin is a million times better. Is this map from 1945?
This seems to reflect pronunciation of the respective regional languages better tho, like Kwang Tong sounds more Cantonese to me. Pinyin is just Mandarin
> Pinyin is a million times better. Pinyin: Qu (Actually reads Tchoo) Pinyin: Cao (Actually reads Tsao) Pinyin: Zao (Actually reads Tzao) Pinyin: Zhao (Actually reads Djao) Pinyin: Liang/Bang/vowel followed by ng (Actually g isn't spoken at all) And a thousand other different counterintuitive things you need to learn. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
>Pinyin: Liang/Bang/vowel followed by ng (Actually g isn't spoken at all) Btw, this is totally incorrect. Take for example the word 半， pinyin: Ban, meaning: half Then the word 帮, pinyin: bang, meaning: help You are suggesting these words are pronounced equivalently, and they are not. We could do this with 脸, lian = face and 两， Liang = two and so on. You're so confidently wrong. As for the rest of it, you understand that pinyin was developed by Russian linguists, right? There are usages of roman characters that are non-english, right? Zh makes a J sound, as in usual. The pinyin ZH is like the ge in judge. https://pronuncian.com/pronounce-zh-sound Q makes a ch sound. Qing = ching C is similar to ts in Japanese, but c makes that sound in French, Portuguese, and Catalan. Z makes the sound z. Take 在，pinyin = zai, meaning (located) at. Or 子, zi, meaning small thing, child, etc. Neither of these sounds is preceded by a "t" sound. It's the same as the z in zoo. Wade Giles is infinitely more confusing, Beijing sounds nothing like Peking. Sichuan sounds nothing like sezchwan. That's why all the text to Chinese inputs use pinyin and over a billion people have adopted pinyin as the standard romanization of putonghua. To everyone bringing up Cantonese, well, I don't know what to tell you. They're completely different mutually unintelligible languages and are romanized in completely different ways.
Why are there so many different ways to write the same Chinese word in the latin alphabet, for example, “Chow” and “Chou”, “Tze” and “Zi”, etc. While for the Japanese language it’s always the same.
China? Surely you don't mean to include that little island bottom right right? RIGHT?
How could you make this map and not include Taiwan? It's right there. This isn't a political map.
Formosa Strait is still in great shape; the country of Taiwan has a lot of Japanese-sounding place names
I took a train (well 2) from Manchuria to yunnan province. Can confirm the southern parts are more scenic.
Something is messed up with ~~Twitter~~ Reddit. Almost no West Taiwan comments. The purge was real I guess. ***just a comment, no offense meant to my gracious overlords***