Go to China main page

Simple Maps of China

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

Chinese Provinces, Taiwan Counties

This map covers most of China. The abbreviations used are official and represent province, "autonomous region," and municipality names. In a very small number of cases, these do not represent full Pinyin spellings, which are therefore given separately (and with tones)."Obsolete Postal" spellings are those used for roughly a century before Pinyin was fully universalized. They continue to be used by a few, largely elderly authors and in Taiwan.

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.

Special municipalities that were too small to fit on this map include:

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

Return to top.

This map covers Táiwān 臺灣 (台湾), including the Pescadores islands in the Taiwan Strait (constituting Pénghú County). The abbreviations used are not official; they are my own invention. As with the previous map, they allow this one to serve as an exercise in addition to being a reference. They represent the following county and municipality names:

Return to top.