ACASIAN is associated with the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative (ECAI), which is led by Professor Lew Lancaster (buddhst@socrates.berkeley.edu), Buddhist Program, U. California, Berkeley, USA.
The ECAI WWW Home Pages at Berkeley are presently under construction. Interim ECAI pages are being maintained by T. Matthew Ciolek Temporary ECAI Home Page
Lawrence Crissman, Director of ACASIAN, prepared some clickable maps of China and Yunnan Province for the recent ECAI meeting in Heidelberg. They were designed to demonstrate how limited such devices are for accessing the rich information sources that ECAI will incorporate into its databases. They may nonetheless be of some interest, and are accordingly made available by clicking the URLs below.
Some are titled 'UNCLICKABLE' because they were designed to demonstrate how impractable it would be do try to make all of the administrative units into clickable areas.
As these maps were designed to be part of an oral demonstration, some instructions are required in order for others to navigate through them.
1. All of the maps showing provinces are now linked to provincial information sheets originally prepared by Dr. Stephen Morgan, Department of Management, The Univesity of Melbourne. They will be updated from time to time.
2. Even the maps with 'UNCLICKABE' in their titles do have clickable areas. Apart from the ACASIAN copyright notice, which is linked back to the ACASIAN Homepage, the other clickable areas of the maps are not visible.
3. Moving the cursor around in the margins of the map will reveal the hidden URLs, which include a default that will bring you back to this page, from where you can start again if necessary.
4. If you place your cursor under the title of a map, you will usually find a URL that will take you to some other map.
5. There is sometimes another clickable region underneath the Province of Yunnan on the maps of China as a whole that will take you to one of the maps of that province.
6. On the maps of China that display county-level administrative boundaries, clicking in the region of the North China Plain and the Sichuan Basin will take you to enlargements of those regions.
7. Clicking in the lower left or right corners of those two maps, opposite the copyright notice, will take you back to the large county boundary map.
This image shows China's provinces after the creation of Chongqing Municipality at the provincial level. All of them, including HongKong and Macao (because of their names) are clickable and lead to .htm documents containing information on the particular provinces.
This image shows China's provinces before the creation of Chongqing Municipality at the provincial level. All of them, including HongKong and Macao (because of their names) are clickable and lead to .htm documents containing information on the particular provinces.
This image of China's prefectures is called 'unclickable' because there are around 350 of them and many are very small. There are however clickable regions around the outside of the map that will lead to other maps or back to this page.
If there are too many prefectures to be feasible to make 'clickable', how about the approxiately 2,400 counties and municipalities?
Even when the image of the county-level administrative units is enlarged, it would be impossible to create 'clickable' regions for all of them.
This enlargement of the North China Plain shows how small some of the counties are in very densely settled parts of China.
Similarly, the Sichuan Basin has very small administrative units.
In contrast, this image of the prefectures and municipalities in Yunnan Province could readily be made 'clickable'.
However, it would again be difficult if not impossible to create 'clickable areas' for all of Yunnan's county-level administrative units. Only the counties in the upper right corner have URLs attached, but they do not lead to any html documents at this time.
In practical terms, it would be necessary to go down to the level of images of individual prefectures to be able to click each of China's county-level administrative units, which would require around three hundred and fifty images like this one. Clearly some better solution is needed to be able to find information on the 2,400 county-level units from images of China.
Chinese Provinces, 1996
'Unclickable' Prefectural Map
'Unclickable' County Map (Small)
'Unclickable' County Map (Large)
Enlargement of North China Plain
Enlargement of the Sichuan Basin
Clickable map of Yunnan Prefectures
Clickable map of Yunnan Counties
Clickable map of Yunnan's Zhaotong Prefecture