Nine Chinas
This is terrific: a colorful little map that breaks China down into nine distinct regions. Probably a bit too concise for real China experts, but I found the shorthand revelatory and useful.
And here, the map’s creator slots the regions one-by-one into a list of the world’s most populous countries. Man that is a lot of people.
Here’s the North American analogue for all of Snarkmarket’s Chinese readers! “Ecotopia”—talk about shorthand—but I love it.
I kind of wish I had the rendering skills to make a 3 dimension version of this kind of map for, say, California—several such maps, floating over each other, different partitions depending on your operating axis of identification. It’s always intriguing to me how different subcultures carve up regions for themselves, and distance become a matter of convention. Who I’m with actually viscerally changes my sense of how long it will take to drive or BART somewhere, or whether it’s reasonable to talk about going to LA for the weekend–or flying to India for three weeks.