Yutuji 舆图集
A hand-drawn historical atlas of China and Asia, published in Chinese at yutuji.com since September 2026. Each issue starts from a line of verse or a passage in a primary source and maps the places, people and dates it names. Every date and fact gives its source and one of four grades.
Issues19 published, 73 plannedDataOpen dataMethodMethod note · doi:10.5281/zenodo.23019771中文目录
Published issues
No. 1Buddhist monasteries of the Southern Dynasties 江南六朝寺迹 · 317–589Monasteries south of the Yangzi from the Eastern Jin to the Chen. Forty-four are described in detail, with what survives of each today; the 245 temple names recorded for the capital, Jiankang (Nanjing), are listed separately. Twelve monks and patrons are followed from place to place, and twenty northern cave-temple sites are given for comparison. No. 2Lin'an: walls and gates of Hangzhou 临安城记 · 591–1949Hangzhou's walls and gates from the prefectural city built under the Sui to the demolition of the walls in the Republic: the outer wall of Wuyue, the Southern Song capital with its imperial avenue and entertainment quarters, the new city of the late Yuan, the ten Ming gates, the Manchu garrison of the early Qing, and the lakeside district laid out on its site. No. 3The Grand Canal 大运河 · 486 BCE–2014From the Han Gou canal of 486 BCE to the Beijing–Hangzhou canal. The Sui and Tang system ran out from Luoyang; the Yuan cut a straight line north to Dadu; for five centuries the Ming and Qing canal had to cross and share the Yellow River, which cut it in two when it changed course in 1855. No. 10A dream of the Eastern Capital: Kaifeng before 1127, with Hangzhou beside it 东京梦华 · 960–1127Meng Yuanlao came to Kaifeng as a boy in 1103, fled south after its fall in 1127 and finished his memoir of the city in 1147. His gates, four rivers, imperial avenue, pleasure quarters, wine houses, night markets, festival year and household rites of marriage and birth are laid on a new map of the Song city. The three walls follow the dimensions measured by archaeologists and are set against the modern axis from the Dragon Pavilion to the South Gate; shops and theatres are placed by the relative positions Meng gives, and marked as approximate. Sixteen line drawings of gates, bridges, towers and festival goods show only the parts his text describes. A last chapter sets Kaifeng beside Hangzhou item by item, from the hour of the dawn watch to the count of coins in a string. No. 14The Shu Roads 蜀道 · 316 BCE–1958Nine roads across the Qinling and Daba mountains between the Wei valley and Sichuan: the Jinniu, Gudao, Baoxie, Tangluo, Ziwu, Micang, Lizhi and Yinping roads, and the Lianyun plank road of the Ming and Qing. Forty-six dated events run from the Qin conquest of Shu in 316 BCE to the Baoji–Chengdu railway of 1958, with the itineraries of Du Fu, Emperor Xuanzong, Deng Ai, Zhuge Liang and Liu Bang. The roads are drawn along the valleys they follow, between known passes, post stations and towns; the legends of the five strongmen and the stone oxen are graded D. No. 16Matteo Ricci's map of the world 坤舆万国全图 · 1582–1610The six-panel world map printed in Beijing in 1602 by Matteo Ricci and Li Zhizao. All 964 place names on the main map are transcribed, identified and classed by how they were rendered into Chinese. The map is redrawn in its own oval projection to measure how far each name sits from its true position, and sixty-two names are followed through later Chinese geographies down to 1852. No. 18Zheng He's voyages: seven expeditions and the Indian Ocean 郑和下西洋 · 1405–1433Eight chapters read seven expeditions from 1405 to 1433 through inscriptions, country accounts, sailing records and surviving charts. Documented sequences, scholarly route reconstructions and detached missions are distinguished from the movements of Zheng He himself. Eighteen object groups set ships, navigation aids, exchange goods, local objects and tribute imagery beside their sources. Uncertain dates, port locations, vessel forms and readings remain identified. No. 26Haiguo tuzhi: a world geography in Chinese and Japanese 海国图志 · 1839–1860Hugh Murray's Encyclopaedia of Geography, translated in Canton as Lin Zexu's Sizhou zhi, enlarged by Wei Yuan into the Haiguo tuzhi of fifty, sixty and a hundred juan, then reprinted in Nagasaki and Edo with Japanese reading marks and translations. Wei Yuan's division of the world into six oceans, 138 transliterations for 28 countries, and eighteen Chinese and Japanese editions. No. 27Xuanzang 玄奘 · 629–664The monk's journey to India and back, 629–645, following the fifty-six stages of his biography by Huili and Yancong, together with the 138 countries of the Da Tang Xiyu ji, the distance and direction the text gives for each, and their modern identifications. The last chapter follows how he became the Tripitaka of Journey to the West. No. 28Zhang Qian: missions to the Yuezhi and Wusun 张骞凿空 · 139 BCE–114 BCESent to seek an alliance with the Yuezhi, Zhang Qian was held by the Xiongnu for more than ten years before reaching Dayuan, Kangju, the Great Yuezhi and Daxia. A later mission took him to Wusun. The Shiji distinguishes these journeys from countries reached by his deputies and countries known only through reports. The date of his first departure is reconstructed; the year of his second departure and his death remain uncertain. No. 29The Silk Road: a name and the things that travelled 丝绸之路 · 139 BCE–1279Ferdinand von Richthofen coined the name in 1877, in the plural, for one of several routes. The issue follows the roads as Chinese sources record them (the two roads of the Hanshu, the three of the Weilüe, Jia Dan's stage-by-stage itinerary west from Anxi) and twenty-eight things that went along them: silk, paper and porcelain westward; grapes, horses, glass, Kuchean music and Buddhism eastward, each with the names it was given on the way. Later attributions, such as the walnuts and pomegranates credited to Zhang Qian, are graded D. No. 58Marco Polo: Kinsay and the Chinese record 马可波罗 · 1271–1298The route described in the Book of Ser Marco Polo: overland from Acre to Shangdu, two itineraries inside China (south-west to Yunnan, south-east along the canal to Hangzhou and Quanzhou), and the voyage home by sea. Each station is identified after Yule–Cordier and graded. Nineteen statements in the Book are set beside the Yuan History, Mengliang lu, Xianchun Lin'an zhi and the Yongle dadian: eight agree, nine differ in detail, one contradicts, one has no Chinese record. Polo's name appears in no Chinese source; the three envoys he names do. No. 62Longquan celadon: kilns, waterways and overseas finds 龙泉青瓷 · 900–2026Eight chapters follow celadon production in the hills of southern Zhejiang from the Five Dynasties period to modern revival. Kiln groups, shipwreck cargoes, excavated sherds and later collections are mapped separately across East and Southeast Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East and Europe. Six transport cases distinguish general land and river corridors, individual voyages, planned destinations and routes reconstructed by researchers. Unknown paths and dates remain open. No. 72Tiangong kaiwu: where things come from 天工开物 · 1637–1771Song Yingxing's treatise on crafts (1637), read for one kind of sentence: this thing comes from that place. Every such sentence is extracted and placed on the map through the Ming administrative geography of the Mingshi. Salt comes in six kinds by source; Jingdezhen is famous for porcelain, yet its clay comes from Wuyuan and Qimen. Objects are drawn in line to the dimensions the text gives, and not drawn where the text gives none. No. 74A century by the lake: houses on West Lake, 1850–1999 湖畔百年 · 1850–1999106 houses and gardens along the northern and southern shores of West Lake in Hangzhou, on Gushan and at Hubin, and the owners and uses each passed through: private house, lent for public use, occupied, taken by the state, destroyed, restored. Most dates rest on modern local history and the press; single sources and oral accounts are marked as such. No. 78The eight Taihang mountain corridors 太行八陉 · 550 BCE–2021Eight named corridors between the Shanxi uplands and the North China Plain, from Zhiguan to Jundu. Chapter maps distinguish a modern geographic reference layer from a published reconstruction. Place profiles, sourced biographies and a chronology connect warfare, road works, local administration, metal production, irrigation, Buddhist inscriptions, travel and railway engineering. Dated events are distinguished from literary and disputed records. Competing identifications of Puyin remain unresolved. No. 90Graves in the hills: tombs around West Lake, 942 to the present 湖山埋骨 · 942–2026Thirty-seven tombs, stupas and cemeteries in the hills around West Lake, from the Wuyue king Qian Yuanguan to the painter Pan Tianshou, each traced through burial, repair, destruction, removal and rebuilding. The graves on Gushan and at Xiling were cleared between December 1964 and March 1965; Qiu Jin, Su Xiaoxiao, Wu Song and Lin Bu are back there today, the rest went to Mapoling and Nantianzhu. Where accounts disagree, each version is listed with its source. Points follow OpenStreetMap and Wikidata; those placed by a nearby landmark are marked as approximate. No. 91West Lake: dredging and its islands 西湖浚治 · 210 BCE–2003How West Lake in Hangzhou was kept from silting into fields. The lake is first named, as Mingsheng Lake, in a southern-dynasties text quoted by the Shuijing zhu, after a sea dyke was built east of Qiantang county. From then on it survived through repeated dredging. Forty-four campaigns, reclamations and bans are listed here from Li Mi's six wells (781) to the westward excavation of 2003, each with who led it, the labour, acreage and silver given in the sources, where the dredged mud went, why each was undertaken in the words of its memorials, and who had occupied the lake. The ten wells and nine intakes that carried lake water into the city are mapped where they can be located. Su Shi's causeway (1090) was piled from water-weed roots; Xiaoyingzhou was ringed with dredged mud under the Wanli reign; Ruan Yuan's mound (1800) is silt. A year slider shows the lake's islands and causeways appearing and disappearing on the modern shoreline; before 1090 the shore is drawn dashed because its extent is unknown. No. 92Southern voices, northern tunes: theatre and its places 南腔北调 · 770 BCE–1795Five chapters trace performers and performance places from pre-imperial China to the Qianlong reign: court entertainers, Tang music offices, the entertainment quarters of Kaifeng and Hangzhou, images of performers in Shanxi, and regional tunes and troupes recorded in Ming and Qing texts. Eighteen line drawings accompany passages on instruments, stages, costume and scenery. Birthplaces, places of employment and documented journeys remain separate; uncertain locations and disputed readings are identified. Grades
ATexts contemporary with the events
BLater texts, or dates computed from the sources
CModern scholarship and present-day identifications
DLegend, later attribution and conjecture
A grade describes the source, not the truth of what it says: an A means the statement is found in a text written at the time. Quoted passages are given in the original and in a literal modern Chinese translation (白话); there are no English translations of the sources.
Sources are cited as in Chinese scholarship, by title in 《》 followed by juan and chapter. Sources that are not books carry a mark: 〔今人〕 modern scholarship, 〔方志〕 local gazetteer, 〔寺志〕 monastery gazetteer, 〔碑刻〕 inscription, 〔图录〕 catalogue, 〔数据库〕 database, 〔口碑〕 oral account, 〔本期〕 the editors' own inference.
Places, people, years, objects, books
Every place, person and year that appears in an issue has its own page listing all the issues that mention it: 1,059 places, 277 people, 570 years, 128 objects and 305 cited works. The pages are in Chinese; English names for places and people are in the data. What the atlas cannot confirm is gathered on one page, 存疑 (doubts): open questions, places the sources name but do not locate, and statements graded D.
Data
The shared records (1,059 places, 277 people, 580 events, 334 works, 128 objects) are published as JSON and CSV under CC BY 4.0, with a description of every field on the open data page. Each release is archived on Zenodo: doi:10.5281/zenodo.23010865. Record ids are permanent and are also the addresses of the pages, so a link or a citation will not break.
Citing
An issue:
COZLABS. “Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤舆万国全图.” Yutuji 舆图集, no. 16, 2026. https://yutuji.com/kunyu/
The data:
COZLABS. Yutuji Historical Atlas: Open Data. Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23010865
The method note:
COZLABS. Yutuji: a hand-drawn historical atlas with graded sources. Method note. Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23019771
Every page ends with a citation in Chinese and in BibTeX (引用此页).