Content created: 1993-12-26
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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, Discontinued Names, Taiwan Counties Taiwan Detail

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 Shànghǎi 上海, located on the JS-ZJ boundary at the outlet of the Yangzi river
• XG Xiānggǎng 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

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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.

For more detail on Taiwan, click here.

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:

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