Chinese provinces, regions and municipalities, 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.

Xinjiang

Xinjiang is about 1.66 million square kilometers, a sixth of the country and larger than any other province or region. Two mountain systems, the Tian Shan and the Kunlun, box in the Tarim Basin between them, and in the middle of that basin is the Taklamakan, one of the largest sand deserts in the world. The Silk Road split to go around it either side.

Tibet

The Tibetan Plateau averages over 4,500 meters and is the highest and largest plateau on earth, which is why it is sometimes called the third pole: outside the polar regions no larger body of ice exists. The Yangtze, the Yellow River, the Mekong, the Salween, the Brahmaputra and the Indus all rise on or around it.

Inner Mongolia

Inner Mongolia stretches about 2,400 kilometers from end to end, from the edge of Xinjiang to the forests of the northeast, and its shape follows the border with Mongolia. It holds roughly a quarter of the world’s known coal reserves and most of the country’s rare earth production, which comes from a single mine at Bayan Obo.

Qinghai

Qinghai is named after that lake, which is the largest in the country. The province sits on the northern edge of the plateau and holds the headwaters of the Yellow River, the Yangtze and the Mekong, so a single area of high grassland feeds the rivers of most of East and Southeast Asia.

Beijing

Beijing is a municipality, meaning it is administered directly rather than as part of a province, one of four in the country. It has been the capital for most of the time since 1272 under the Yuan, Ming, Qing and the People’s Republic. The Forbidden City at its center was the imperial palace from 1420 to 1924.

Shanghai

Shanghai is the largest city in the country and its port handles more container traffic than any other in the world. It was a fishing and cotton town until the treaty of 1842 opened it to foreign trade and carved out concessions run by Britain, France and the United States; the buildings of the Bund date from that stretch.

Guangdong

Guangdong has about 127 million people, more than any other province and more than Japan. The delta of the Pearl River at its southern edge was made a special economic zone in 1980, and Shenzhen went from a county of some 300,000 people to a city of over 12 million inside four decades. Cantonese is the local language.

Hainan

Hainan is the smallest province by land area, about 35,000 square kilometers, and the only one that is entirely tropical. It was part of Guangdong until 1988. For most of imperial history it was where the court sent officials it wanted a long way away, which is roughly what the poet Su Shi was doing there in 1097.

Sichuan

The eastern half of Sichuan is a basin ringed by mountains, which traps cloud so thoroughly that the province is famously short of sunshine. That basin has been one of the great rice regions of Asia since the Dujiangyan irrigation system was built on the Min River around 256 BC, without a dam, and it still works.

Heilongjiang

Heilongjiang is named for that river: the Chinese name means black dragon river. It is the coldest province in the country, with winter temperatures in the north falling below minus 30 degrees Celsius, and the ice festival at Harbin builds a city of lit blocks cut out of the Songhua every January.

Shandong

Shandong was the home of Confucius, born at Qufu around 551 BC, and of Mencius after him. Mount Tai in its center is the first of the five sacred mountains and has been climbed by emperors for two thousand years. The province has about 101 million people, second only to Guangdong.

Yunnan

Yunnan holds more of the country’s recorded plant and animal species than any other province, because it ranges from tropical forest at 76 meters to peaks over 6,700. Three great rivers, the Yangtze, the Mekong and the Salween, run parallel through its northwest within about 100 kilometers of each other before separating for good.

Shaanxi

Xi’an, in the south of Shaanxi, was the capital under thirteen dynasties including the Han and the Tang, and was the eastern end of the Silk Road. The terracotta army of the first emperor stands about 40 kilometers east of it, found by farmers digging a well in 1974.

Gansu

The narrow part is the Hexi Corridor, a strip of oases between mountains and desert that was the only practical road from China to Central Asia. The Great Wall ends at Jiayuguan in the middle of it. The Mogao caves at Dunhuang, at the far end, hold about 492 painted grottoes cut between the fourth and fourteenth centuries.

Chongqing

Chongqing was split from Sichuan in 1997 to administer the resettlement of over a million people displaced by the Three Gorges Dam downstream. It is built on hills where the Jialing meets the Yangtze, steep enough that it is one of the few large Chinese cities with almost no bicycles.

Zhejiang

Zhejiang has the most broken coastline of any province, with over 3,000 islands off it. Hangzhou, its capital, was the capital of the Southern Song from 1138 and was described by Marco Polo as the finest city in the world. The southern end of the Grand Canal, which runs 1,776 kilometers north to Beijing, is here.

Jiangsu

Jiangsu is the flattest province in the country: almost 70 percent of it is under 50 meters, and it is threaded with canals and lakes. Nanjing, its capital, was the capital of China at several points, most recently under the Republic from 1927. The province has the highest income per head of any province.

How this one works

The other maps of China

Turkey has the same map in Turkish provinces. South Korea has the same map in Korean provinces. All three together on the China atlas page, the country itself on the China guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.