OpenStreetMap

rivers in China

Posted by katpatuka on 3 February 2010 in English.

...mapping rivers in China is really exiting: you stumble about unmapped rivers all the time! You try to find a bigger city along the river and look it up in the english wikipedia just to find a location stub! No river mentioned there. Even the wikipedia is way behind! Then you start to google "thatcityname river" but the only thing you learn is that there are no good sources concerning location data in China! Luckily years ago I occasionally bought a map on the fleamarket: China Far East, Hallwag, 1989/1990 - but it's 1:6.000.000 and the names are odd. At least it gives you an idea which river basin it may be...

Discussion

Comment from malenki on 13 January 2013 at 03:38

Had the same problem in Korea and couldn’t solve it for some rivers. Another problem is when other mappers enhance a riverbank to an attributing river…

For names and such I also look at wikpedia using this map: http://toolserver.org/~kolossos/openlayers/kml-on-ol.php?zoom=3&lat=41.37889&lon=67.89814&layers=0B0000TTTF

This free maps can be helpful, too: http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/ams/index.html

Comment from katpatuka on 13 January 2013 at 07:12

I kind of solved the problem after finding hyd5_4m.zip on http://nfgis.nsdi.gov.cn/mapdata/ (now defunct) which consists of a shapefile of chinese rivers.

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