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China.” In fact, the cotton-producing Songjiang, together with the nearby silk-textile
center of Suzhou, constituted the core of the booming Jiangnan market economy in
the late Ming and high Qing periods.
Chinese historical geography once applied only a qualitative method when
reconstructing a historical horizontal cross-section to examine related sectional
issues (So and Tam
2012
). This method is inadequate in analyzing transitions
via synchronic and diachronic comparisons (Li
2000
). The increasing application
of GISs in recent decades has had an impressive effect on the approaches of
historical geographers, as it is now possible to analyze the spatial changes of
geography over time using a computer (Zhang
2006
). The combination of GISs and
historical geography (i.e., historical GISs) has become an increasingly attractive
research direction. Several historical GISs were prepared recently to provide a good
deal of historical geography information (Lin et al.
2006
). For example, Harvard
University and Fudan University co-developed a Chinese historical GIS to establish
a database of populated places and historical administrative units over the course
of Chinese history from 222 B.C. to 1911. Moreover, the “Chinese civilization
in time and space” set up by the Academia Sinica of Taiwan constructed a GIS
application infrastructure for China across a timeframe of several thousand years
(Zhang et al.
2007
). These are important attempts to establish China's historical
GISs at the national level. However, because they were created by scanning the
secondary source of the Chinese historical maps prepared by Tan Qixiang
譚
(originally done from base maps with 1:4,000,000 scales; Tan
1980
)and
provide only prefecture boundaries (Fig.
11.2
), they can only create polygons at
the prefectural level.
其驤
Fig. 11.2
A sample of the historical maps prepared by Tan Qixiang
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