The HGIS Experience of Drawing Sub-county Unit Boundaries in the Jiangnan Region of Late Imperial China - Space-Time Integration in Geography and GIScience - page 179

Fig. 11.4 The bao divisions of the Songjiang prefecture (The points representing the towns of the
Songjiang prefecture)

Last but not least, we used hundreds of temple points to boost the accuracy
of the bao boundaries. In category (12) Buddhist and Daoist temples of different
generations of the Songjiang fuji , the coordinates and bao identities of about 500
temples of different religions are given in detail. We applied the same principles
behind encircling the town points to drawing the bao boundaries to address the
temples. Thus, we created about 50 polygons for the Songjiang prefecture sub-
county division on a base of over 650 points (Fig. 11.4 ).
One possible contribution of this sub-county division boundary drawing, which is
the first and only drawing of its kind in the Chinese history field, to historical geog-
raphy is that the infrastructure of these accurately drawn polygons are measurable
in the ArcGIS system. It is because the sizes of the respective areas are measurable,
we could now calculate and display the population density and taxation levels of
each micro-division when the relevant population and fiscal figures were taken from
category (16) (i.e., fiscal matters) of the local gazetteers.
The local gazetteers of the Songjiang region do not directly give the population
figure of each bao . Instead, they provide the li or ding (taxable male) figures

of all of the townships. These figures were originally assigned according to the
actual population of the bao in the early Ming and early Qing periods, respectively.
We may estimate that they represent the approximate percentages of each township
against the total of the Songjiang prefecture. Amongst the versions of the Songjiang
fuji , the most comprehensive figures of the li and ding are given in the fiscal matters
category of the early Qing version, which was compiled during Kangxi's reign
(1677-1722). Table 11.1 shows the number of li and ding of each bao and their
population percentages (4 sig. fig.) against the total of the Songjiang prefecture.

丁