About: Three Kingdom Maps

Tan Qixiang's Historical Atlas of China is the most authoritative atlas of Chinese history and remains a standard reference for historical geography.²

Like all historical cartography, however, the atlas inevitably involves approximation and informed interpretation. Compiled in the 1980s, before the advent of comprehensive digital datasets and improved access to historical sources and far-flung places, some errors and uncertainties are unavoidable. The maps should not be read as a perfectly accurate reconstruction, but it remains among the best available estimates of where places were located and what their surrounding landscapes looked like.

These maps reflect the administrative geography of the 260s, while games and the Romance of the Three Kingdoms often focus on earlier parts of the era. By the 260s, many counties and towns had been merged, abolished, renamed, or had fallen out of use.

Additionally, some locations featured in stories or games are fictional, or have been conflated with later place names, and are therefore not represented on these maps.

This project georeferences Tan's maps with modern towns and cities that also appear in the original atlas, using them as anchor points for alignment. Topography from HydroSHEDS³ (~100m resolution) has been incorporated to provide elevation context.

In some cases, rivers in the original atlas do not align with valleys in the modern topography. Where possible, they have been adjusted to follow thenearest plausible valley, while preserving their overall course. Where no convincing correspondence exists, they have been left as originally drawn. These adjustments are necessarily approximate, as river courses may have shifted significantly since antiquity, particularly across lowland floodplains. Even so, the integration of elevation data should provide a closer approximation of the overall landscape.

In most cases, the standard modern Hanyu Pinyin system is used. For more obscure or ambiguous names, I traced the root meaning of the characters and matched them with the most appropriate modern Pinyin pronunciation.

One example is Jianwei/Qianwei. Today, the town is known as Qianwei (犍為), and indeed the first character is usually given only the Qian- pronunciation. However, in Han-period records and artefacts the commandery appears as Jianwei (楗為), with a wood radical (木) rather than a cow radical (牛).^{4 5 6} At some point after the Han, the character and its pronunciation somehow shifted. In the maps, both pronunciations are included for accessibility, since it is unclear whether the change had already occurred by the Three Kingdoms period.

Inevitably, some cases may have been overlooked or interpreted differently. If you notice any errors or have questions about particular names or locations, please don't hesitate to get in touch.

Generally, waterways with the character 渠 (qu, "canal") in their names can be identified as canals, since these were deliberately constructed or engineered channels. In flatter, agriculturally intensive regions, especially downstream of the Yellow River, the distinction becomes less clear. Existing channels were often excavated, altered, redirected, or reinforced to serve irrigation and transport purposes, effectively functioning as canals even if not entirely man-made

For this project, I have included only the major canal-rivers. I have not explicitly marked their many tributaries and connecting channels as canals, though they were most likely part of the broader network.