About this map

Atlas of China is an illustrated travel map for visitors from abroad. Zoom into a province, open a place for its story and practical tips, and plan the days between them.

How the content is made

Place descriptions, city introductions and travel tips are written for this site and checked against official lists and published sources. Entry rules, ticket booking and opening arrangements change often, so please confirm with official sources before you travel. Train and flight times in the itinerary come from one weekday's timetables, or are estimated from distance where we have none. They are not live schedules, so check them when you book.

Data and photos

Terrain: Terrain Tiles (Mapzen, AWS Open Data)
Satellite imagery: Powered by Esri. World Imagery from Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics, and the GIS User Community
Administrative boundaries: DataV GeoAtlas
Coastlines, rivers and lakes: Natural Earth (public domain)
Airports: OurAirports (public domain), corrected against the CAAC's yearly airport statistics
Railway lines and stations: © OpenStreetMap contributors. The rail data derived from it is available under the Open Database License: rail.json, stations.json and rail-net.json (travel times between hubs).
Train times and fares: China Railway's timetable for one weekday
Flights: schedules from AeroDataBox, with route lists from English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Photos: Wikimedia Commons, each under its own free licence. The author and licence are shown on every photo.

Open data

The regions, featured places and listed sites on the atlas, with their coordinates, Chinese names and listings, are published as CSV and JSON under CC BY 4.0 at /data/, together with the UNESCO and 5A lists as we use them. Quote the page or the dataset and link back.

Privacy

No accounts and no cookies. Your trip is kept in your own browser and only leaves it if you share a link.
We count visits with Umami, which sets no cookies and stores no personal data. Besides page visits it counts a few actions, such as opening a place or sharing a trip, so we can see which parts of the map are useful.
Our server also keeps aggregate counts of page requests by country, source and kind of visitor (a browser, a search engine's crawler, an AI assistant), without IP addresses or anything that identifies a person. We use them to see who reads which pages.
To show the map, your browser loads elevation tiles from Amazon Web Services, and, if you turn on satellite imagery, the imagery from Esri. Like any web server, they receive your IP address with each request. Everything else, fonts included, comes from this site, which is served by Cloudflare.

Last updated October 2026.