Beyond and Within Images:A Preliminary Exploitation to Chinese Historical City Maps
This paper comprises two main parts.The first part takes an overview on Chinese historical city maps and discusses its sorts and characteristics in the historical periods based on widely literature written by former scholars.With the analysis on contemporary Chinese cartography study,the author forwards its problems and considers that the Chinese historical maps are kind of image with ideologies.The second part focuses on the relationship hetween maps and cities.From a perspective of urban planning and architecture,this paper points out the roles that different kinds of ancient city maps can be played in the study of urban image,urban inner structure and regional urban structure respectively.Finally,this paper stresses on the combination of literature with ancient maps,quantitative analysis based on the data of historical cities,and application of GIS to achieve creative results in the study of historical city.