Reinforced levees along the Jiangnan Canal disrupted sediment-water balance of Eastern Taihu Lake during the Ming Dynasty. Intense siltation drove rapid expansion of the lake-field water network. During the early Ming period, lake flows could reach canal levees, by the mid-Ming Dynasty, siltation and lake fields fragmented waters west of the canal in Eastern Taihu Lake. Outflow became channel-dependent, forming three key waterways: Xishui Lu (西水路), Dongshui Lu (东水路), and Jiangcao Lu (江漕路). These changes altered lake-canal dynamics, flow patterns, and water network morphology. The Ming-Qing period saw dominant siltation and lake-field consolidation trend of Eastern Taihu Lake force outflow along field edges—north to Guajing Estuary and south to Tangjia Lake (唐家湖). Consequent northward outflow concentration shifted the Wusong River’s main thalweg from Changqiao River (长桥河) to Guajing Port (瓜泾港), triggering major hydrological changes that worsened siltation and reclamation.
Ming-Qing documents primarily frame human-tiger interactions through incidents of ‘tiger attacking/biting people’ and responses like ‘expelling/capturing tigers’, creating an impression of pervasive tiger threats. Concurrently, tiger symbolism shifted from ‘sacred’ to ‘dangerous’. In Huanglong Mountain (黄龙山) during late Ming to mid-Qing periods, environmental and social histories surrounding human-tiger conflicts reveal the competition for living space, societal instability affecting human-tiger relations, and local officials’ governance strategies for tiger plagues. The scholar-official class’s utilitarian governance concepts, values, and political ethics profoundly influenced these strategies. Fundamentally, however, preserving political order and social stability constituted the core objective driving both tiger management and local governance.
The 1930s-1940s witnessed two relocations of Songzi (松滋) County’s administrative center on the south bank of Yangtze River—a quintessential case of water-environment changes triggering cascading effects. During the late Qing Dynasty, the formation of the ‘Bei Jiang Nan Tuo’ (North Mainstream, South Distributaries, 北江南沱) and Songzi River diminished the original shipping advantages of Songzi Town while establishing new hydrological hubs. This transformation reconfigured regional transportation networks and intra-county transit patterns, thereby shifting market-town distributions and economic centers. Consequently, a ‘north-south division’ emerged in political geography, directly driving the administrative relocations. Unlike disaster- or war-induced moves, these transfers resulted from natural geographical changes through causal chains that ultimately altered political geographical patterns. Both relocations reflect compounded effects of transportation, economic, and political geographical factors stemming from water-environment evolution.
By examining the principles of the Guanban (官班) system and the patterns of official promotion in the Southern Liang Dynasty, this paper reconstructs the ranks of the dynasty’s 56 prefectures. Using the hierarchical differentiation within the 18-class Guanban system as a basis, the 9th class is employed as the standard to distinguish between core and peripheral areas within the political geography of Southern Liang. Under this framework, the core area of Southern Liang exhibits two forms: a patchy distribution in Yangzhou (扬州), Nanxuzhou (南徐州), northern Jiangzhou (江州), and the Jianghan Plain; and a point-like distribution in the Jianghuai and Lingnan regions. The interplay of these forms results in a new hierarchical political geography pattern for Xiao Liang.
The Jimi (loose-rein, 羁縻) and Zhouxian (prefecture-county, 州县) systems represent fundamentally distinct governance approaches. While dynastic states typically transformed governance by Tusi (abolishing hereditary chieftains, 土司) in monarchical ethnic regions, the Yao communities (徭蛮) along the Jinghu-Guangnan (荆湖、广南) frontier lacked centralized leadership. Scholars conventionally assumed this region transitioned directly from Jimi to Zhouxian systems. Contrary to this view, the indigenous ‘Kuan’ (pledge-based alliance, 款) organization profoundly shaped governance transformation. Between the Song and Ming dynasties, state officials consistently leveraged the Kuan framework to advance frontier governance through phased policies, from militarizing Kuan members, military integration of Kuan structures, to administrative conversion that replacing Kuan with Li (里) units. During this transition from frontier institution to Zhouxian governance, the Kuan evolved from a provisional civil-defense organization into a foundational administrative unit responsible for taxation, conscription, public security, and Confucian indoctrination.
A key Kangxi-era reform in Yunnan’s local governance incorporated military garrisons (卫所) into adjacent civil administrations, consolidating dispersed garrison taxes and military household registrations. This process was complicated when the rebel Daxi Army (led by Zhang Xianzhong) and Wu Sangui successively established military and princely estates through land confiscations during the Ming-Qing transition, blurring military-civilian land distinctions and social identities. These actions created institutional loopholes enabling military households—whose tax obligations and registrations spanned multiple jurisdictions—to merge into civilian registries. The ensuing ‘Tonghai-Hexi Border Dispute’ (“通河分疆”) exemplifies these tensions: a county-level conflict over corvée obligations from Seven Longhuo military colonies (龙火七营). This case illuminates Qing efforts to unify household registrations and land taxes during garrison-county integration, fundamentally rooted in disparate corvée burdens that critically shaped military-civil administration reforms.
During the Republic of China period, the establishment of new urban administrative districts (cities) led to territorial disputes between these cities and their original ‘mother counties’, including conflicts over boundary demarcation and government relocation. Unlike most mother counties that moved their seats to towns within their own jurisdictions, Hang County (杭县) sought to incorporate the Gongchenqiao (拱宸桥) area—then under Hangzhou City’s administration—into its territory and establish it as the new county seat. Eventually, Gongchenqiao was transferred to Hang County and became its new administrative center. By examining the complex process of Hang County’s contested relocation, this study reveals that the move resulted from the interplay between national institutional frameworks and multiple local sociopolitical factors, including internal demands, bureaucratic dynamics, and public sentiment. This case also represents the only instance in Republican-era city-county disputes that involved both jurisdictional redivision and government relocation.
Since 1949, county-level administrative divisions in Guizhou Province have undergone significant transformations characterized by five key features when analyzed through six dimensions—establishment, nomenclature, jurisdiction, administrative affiliation, seat location, and hierarchical level: pronounced quantitative fluctuations, gradual diversification of division types, substantial structural reorganization, progressive adjustment of same-category divisions, and increasing stabilization of ethnic autonomous counties. These patterns reflect both universal trends in China’s nationwide administrative restructuring and distinctive particularities shaped by Guizhou’s unique resource endowment and ethnic composition, collectively establishing this provincial evolution as an instructive case study for understanding county-level administrative reforms in contemporary China.
The Bibliothèque Nationale de France has recently acquired a fragment of a China map drawn by Michal Piotr Boym, a Jesuit missionary who came to China during the late Ming Dynasty. This fragment belongs to the same category as the three previously discovered Type A manuscripts of Boym’s China map. The fragment features annotations in both Latin and Chinese, and its right side is adorned with vignettes depicting human figures along with their respective captions. The annotations indicate that this particular map is the earliest among the Type A manuscripts. It is based on the 1586 edition of the Daming yitong wenwu si yamen guanzhi and may have incorporated several Chinese sources, including the world map by Matteo Ricci. The vignettes, derived from Ming Dynasty prints, faithfully reproduce the originals while integrating Western painting techniques. However, the captions omit the original contexts and assign new narratives to the images, reflecting Boym’s intention to demonstrate the state of Christianity in China during the Chongzhen’s reign. As one of the manuscripts of Boym’s China map, the newly discovered fragment provides insight into the evolution of his cartographic style and the early exchange between China and the West in the fields of geography and art.
The 20th century witnessed the flourishing of the British and Anglo-American historical geography, producing numerous influential works of global significance. The evolution of the British and Anglo-American historical geography during this period can be subdivided into three main phrases that characterized by epistemological shifts: scientism, humanism, and postmodernism. Each phrase manifested distinct methodological approaches and research paradigms, including environmental determinism, structuralism, logical positivism, humanism, postmodernism, postcolonialism, and deconstructionism. The discipline gradually transitioned from early emphases on the material forms of cultural landscapes to ideational analyses, giving rise to various research schools such as landscape imagery, landscape symbolism, and landscape semiotics. Elements such as consciousness, symbolism, power-knowledge, institutions, culture, ethnicity, and gender associated with cultural landscapes became primary focuses, marking a departure from the mainstream scientific paradigms of classical historical geography. In academic research, there exists no hierarchy of methodological superiority. The introduction of new methodologies should not negate previous approaches but rather complement and refine them; new understandings should not completely discard old perspectives but instead enhance and perfect them based on existing foundations. The summarization and evaluation of the 20th century the British and Anglo-American historical geography research paradigms hold significant referential value for the development of Chinese historical geography today.
The Western Han Dynasty bamboo slips unearthed at Zoumalou (走马楼) reveal the existence of several county-level administrative districts in Changsha State during Emperor Wu’s reign, which are not documented in extant literature. Changlai (长赖) and Nanshan (南山) counties show a relationship of succession with the Linxiang (临湘) townships mentioned in the Eastern Han Dynasty bamboo slips found at Wuyi Square. Specifically, Changlai County was located near Yangshahu (洋沙湖) Village, Yangshahu Town, Xiangyin (湘阴) County, Hunan Province. Nanshan County was situated in the Zhaoshan (昭山) area, Yuetang (岳塘) District, Xiangtan (湘潭) City, Hunan Province. Fuyang (富阳) County was on the north bank of the Fushui River (富水), near Dalu (大路) Township, Tongshan (通山) County, Hubei Province. Nanyang (南阳) County was on the north bank of the Nanshui River (南水), within the area of Luxi (芦溪) Town, Luxi County, Jiangxi Province. A systematic investigation of these newly identified county-level administrative districts in the Zoumalou bamboo slips is of great significance for studying the territory and administrative divisions of Changsha State during the Western Han Dynasty.
Modern annotations of Ming Dynasty historical texts and atlases have confused ‘Wuzhou Island’ (浯洲屿) and ‘Wu Island’ (浯屿) in southeastern Fujian. This paper examines the islands’ names, locations, sizes, economic activities, fortifications, and cartographic labels, confirming that they were distinct geographical entities during the Ming Dynasty. Correcting historical place-name errors help deepen academic understanding of China’s historical maritime sovereignty.
The Geographical Records of Liao Shi contains errors regarding place names and the evolution of the administrative system. The 2016 revised edition published by Zhonghua Book Company still exhibits oversights in collation, with many issues remaining uncorrected. This paper identifies over ten questionable historical records and examines them through textual research.
