Chinese cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 7 learning regions, matching the rounds on the China guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 17 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Beijing

Beijing has around 21 million people. It was laid out on a north to south axis that still runs about 8 kilometers through the middle of the city, from the Bell Tower down through the Forbidden City to Yongdingmen, and the Olympic park of 2008 was built as an extension of that same line northward.

Shanghai

Shanghai is the most populous city in the country, with about 24 million people, and its port has been the busiest in the world by container volume since 2010. The name means upon the sea. The Pudong side, all towers now, was farmland and warehouses until it was opened for development in 1990.

Guangzhou

Guangzhou, long known in English as Canton, was for centuries the only port where foreigners were allowed to trade with China, under the system that ran from 1757 until the First Opium War. The Canton Fair, held twice a year since 1957, is the largest trade fair in the country.

Shenzhen

Shenzhen was a county of a few hundred thousand people when it was made the first special economic zone in 1980. It now has over 12 million and produces a large share of the world’s consumer electronics; the Huaqiangbei market at its center is the biggest electronic components market anywhere.

Chongqing

Chongqing served as the wartime capital of China from 1938 to 1945 after the fall of Nanjing, and was bombed by Japanese aircraft for five years. Its hills are steep enough that a metro line runs through the sixth to eighth floors of an apartment building at Liziba.

Xi'an

Xi’an was the capital under thirteen dynasties and, as Chang’an under the Tang, was probably the largest city in the world around 750, with perhaps a million people inside the walls. It was the eastern terminus of the Silk Road. The Ming city wall, 13.7 kilometers around, still stands and can be walked or cycled.

Lhasa

Lhasa sits at about 3,650 meters, one of the highest cities in the world. The Potala Palace above it was built on the site of a seventh-century fort and rebuilt from 1645; it rises thirteen storeys up the hillside and was the seat of the Dalai Lamas until 1959. The railway from Qinghai, opened in 2006, crosses a pass at 5,072 meters.

Ürümqi

Ürümqi is farther from any sea than any other major city on earth, about 2,500 kilometers from the nearest coastline. It sits on the northern side of the Tian Shan, and the whole country runs on Beijing time, so the sun here rises around eight in the morning and sets close to ten at night in summer.

Kashgar

Kashgar sits where the two branches of the Silk Road that went around the Taklamakan met again before crossing the Pamirs. It has been a market town for over two thousand years and is closer to Baghdad than to Beijing. The old town, with its Sunday livestock market, is still the commercial center of the western basin.

Harbin

Harbin grew from a village after Russia built the Chinese Eastern Railway through it in 1898, and the onion domes of St. Sophia are left from that. Winter temperatures fall to around minus 25 degrees Celsius, cold enough that the ice festival cuts blocks from the frozen Songhua and builds full-size buildings out of them.

Chengdu

Chengdu has been on the same site under the same name for more than two thousand years, which few cities anywhere can claim. The world’s first paper money was issued here under the Song. The breeding center north of the city holds a large share of the captive giant panda population.

Wuhan

Wuhan is three old towns, Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, merged in 1927 at the meeting of the Yangtze and the Han. The uprising of October 1911 that ended the Qing dynasty started at Wuchang. The first bridge to carry road and rail across the Yangtze opened here in 1957.

Qingdao

Qingdao was leased to Germany from 1898 to 1914, which is why the old quarter has German villas and why the brewery founded in 1903 is still the second largest in the country. The port is one of the busiest in the world and the sailing events of the 2008 Olympics were held here.

Dalian

Dalian sits at the end of the Liaodong Peninsula, guarding the entrance to the Bohai Sea, which is why Russia and then Japan took so much trouble over it between 1898 and 1945. Its ice-free harbor is the northernmost on the Chinese coast that stays open all winter.

Kunming

Kunming sits at about 1,890 meters on a plateau, high enough that it barely has a winter or a summer; the nickname is the spring city. The Burma Road ran from here to Lashio and was the only overland supply route into unoccupied China between 1938 and 1942.

Sanya

Sanya is at 18 degrees north, roughly the latitude of Hawaii, and is the only genuinely tropical resort city in the country. It was a place of exile for disgraced officials for most of imperial history, which is why a rock on the shore is inscribed with characters meaning the edge of the sky.

Dunhuang

Dunhuang was the last Chinese town on the Silk Road before the desert. The Mogao caves nearby hold about 492 grottoes painted between the fourth and fourteenth centuries, and a walled-up library room opened in 1900 gave up some 50,000 manuscripts, including the Diamond Sutra of 868, the earliest dated printed book known.

How this one works

The other maps of China

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Germany has the same map in German cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the China atlas page, the country itself on the China guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.