DeanChensj/jiangshan-map

Worth an evening if you read Chinese history or classical poetry and keep losing track of where Jiankang, Huangzhou or Languan Pass actually sit today. It is a browsing and teaching aid, not a research-grade GIS source.

The problem

A reader following Su Shi's exile has to hold two maps in mind: the dynasty's borders at that moment and today's provinces. Static atlases are scattered; a place-name search gives modern coordinates but not the era's administrative name. Here you set a year, borders redraw, and clicking a city shows how its name and jurisdiction changed across 18 eras. You get one scrubbable canvas instead of many tabs.

What's different

The mechanism is a time slider over 164 territory snapshots, with multi-polity scenes rendered together — the Seven Warring States, Three Kingdoms warlords, and Song alongside Liao, Western Xia, Dali and Jin. Clicking a place opens a genealogy card with a poetic epigraph, dynasty-by-dynasty administrative history, imperial-capital badges, and events that jump the timeline to that year. A separate search plots a person's milestones as arcs across changing borders, so Qin Shi Huang's conquests or Zhang Qian's mission play out stop by stop.

Two choices stand out. The README exposes a URL protocol where a link needs only year and place, and the atlas resolves ancient and modern names — designed for LLM and agent use, and handy for bookmarking a poem's setting. The transition from the "Begonia Leaf" shape to the modern "Rooster" outline is drawn with dashed boundary diffs, making that cartographic change visible. The trade-off is honesty about precision: the author states historical contours and prefecture boundaries are schematic approximations, not surveyed borders. Fine for orientation and classrooms; not for measuring or citing boundaries.

Who should try it

Good fit: a history teacher whose students hunt for Wuwei in Western Han in the built-in pinpoint quiz, or a reader locating a Tang exile poem. The bilingual UI and shareable deep links suit lesson prep. Poor fit: anyone needing authoritative boundary data for research — the README lists GIS references but does not claim the map is a citable reconstruction.

Requirements and limitations

It is a browser app; the live demo is the entry point. Self-hosting means a JavaScript project and the contributing guide for repository structure, data conventions and validation checks. The main constraint is evidentiary: territory shapes are schematic. The second is upkeep — adding an era or figure means editing structured data under those conventions. It is GPL-3.0 and derives partly from GPL-3.0 historical basemaps, which matters if you reuse assets.

HotRepo's take

HotRepo's only recorded observation is 2026-10-24: 1,296 stars, +57 that day, one appearance on the daily trending board. With a single snapshot, persistence cannot be judged. Verify on the live demo that your era is among the 164 snapshots and detailed enough for your use.