Year-end Sale % OFF 
Abstract
Abstract. Long-term urban extent data are highly desirable for understanding urban land use patterns. However, urban observation data based on remote sensing are typically confined to recent decades. In this study, we advance in this arena by reconstructing the walled cities for China that extend from the 15th century to the 19th century based on multiple historical documents. Cities in late imperial China (the Ming and the Qing dynasties, 1368–1911) generally had city walls, and these walls were usually built around the built-up urban area. By restoring the extent of the city walls, it is helpful to explore the urban extent in this period. Firstly, we collected the years of construction or reconstruction of city walls from the historical data. Specifically, the period in which the size of the city wall remains unchanged is recorded as a lifetime of it. Secondly, a specialization on the extent of the city wall could be conducted based on the urban morphology method and a variety of documentation, including the historical literature materials, the military topographic maps of the first half of the 20th century, and the remote sensing images of the 1970s. The correlation and integration of the lifetime and the spatial data led to the creation of the China City Wall Areas Dataset (CCWAD) for the late imperial period. Based on the proximity to the time of most of the city walls, we selected six representative years (i.e., 1400, 1537, 1648, 1708, 1787, and 1866) from CCWAD to produce the China Urban Extent Dataset (CUED) for the 15th–19th centuries. These datasets are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14112968.v3 (Xue et al., 2021).
Highlights
As cities are one of the most obvious phenomena on the Earth’s surface arising from human activities, human productivity has increased significantly since the industrial revolution, which has led to the expansion of population and the acceleration of urbanization (Mumford, 1968; SanchezRodriguez et al, 2005)
With complex interactions happening in global environmental changes, the evolution of urban scale and spatial distribution is an important part of global change research (Solecki et al, 2013; Seto and Ramankutty, 2016; Goldewijk et al, 2017; Bai et al, 2018; Kuang et al, 2021)
There is still a lack of city wall and urban extent datasets with high resolution and definite age for late imperial China. The aim of this project was to collect multiple historical data sources related to the city walls of late imperial China, digitize them, and make the China City Wall Areas Dataset (CCWAD) and China Urban Extent Dataset (CUED) for the late imperial period in the 15th–19th centuries
Summary
As cities are one of the most obvious phenomena on the Earth’s surface arising from human activities, human productivity has increased significantly since the industrial revolution, which has led to the expansion of population and the acceleration of urbanization (Mumford, 1968; SanchezRodriguez et al, 2005). The rapidly expanding built-up urban area has serious impacts on regional and global changes by modifying the characteristics of the underlying surface while exacerbating human activities such as fossil fuel combustion (Seto et al, 2012; Rodriguez et al, 2018). China’s industrial revolution did not start until the end of the 19th century, while the pattern of cities in late imperial China in the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1911) laid the foundation for Chinese cities in modern time (Skinner, 1977)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
