Simple Map of China

Discontinued Names, Taiwan Detail

It is a pet peeve of mine that most textbooks use geographical terms that are not found on the maps they provide. This site contains very simple outline maps of China and Taiwan with the official names of Chinese provinces and of Taiwan counties.

If you would like to print out a reference copy of either map, click on it to get a page with the map alone.

The map on this page covers most of China. The abbreviations used are official and represent province, "autonomous region," and municipality names. In a very small number of cases, the official spellings are not simply toneless Pinyin, so real Pinyin is given separately with the Chinese characters. "Obsolete Postal" spellings are those used for roughly a century before Pinyin was fully universalized. They continue to be used in Taiwan and by a few elderly authors elsewhere. A separate table at the end lists names of provinces that have been absorbed into other units.

It may seem an inconvenience to have the map itself labeled with the abbreviations rather than the full names, but it allows the map to do double-service as a learning device. After you have become initially familiar with these names, you can use the map to test yourself on their locations, which turns out to be a very effective way to connect the arbitrary names with specific areas.

Click on the map to toggle major rivers on and off. Click here for a larger copy of the map.

The following special municipalities were too small to fit on this map:

• AM Àomén 澳门, formerly Macao, located in the middle of the south coast of GD
• CQ Chōngqìng 重庆, formerly part of SC.
• SH Shànghăi 上海, located on the JS-ZJ boundary at the outlet of the Yangzi river
• TJ Tiānjīn 天津 (once spelled Tientsin), located east of BJ
• XG Xiānggăng 香港, usually spelled Hong Kong, located in the middle of the south coast of GD

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The following province names are no longer in use. The territories that they covered have now been assimilated into other units. Most of these changes occurred after 1949, however, and are not recognized by the government in Taiwan, where most maps and other sources continue to use the earlier boundaries and names. This table may be of help if you read a source that refers to a province that cannot be found in the list above.

During the Communist period (period 23), JL was enlarged to include parts of adjacent provinces; LN was enlarged to include parts of adjacent provinces; HAI was created in 1987 from part of GD.

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