This is the raster file of the assembled maps from the Shanghai Shi shang yong di tu ce” bian ji wei yuan hui. Shanghai shi shangyong ditu ce 上海市商用地圖冊 Shanghai business atlas. 2 vols. Shanghai: Shanghai fanyi chuban gongsi, 1989.

The original volumes contained individual maps for each street block in the Shanghai Municipality. It should be noted that the coverage of the maps in the original volumes includes the whole municipality. Yet, we selected and processed only ther larger urban area only.

The Shanghai shi shangyong ditu ce 上海市商用地圖冊 was designed as a commercial atlas. It was the initiative of a private company under official guidance. These two volumes are the parent volumes of a larger collection of five volumes that list each business venture in the municipality [本书是一部包括850多幅地图和22000多家企业概况的大型多用途工具书]. Volume 1 and volume 2 contained respectively 909 maps and 851 maps.

We cropped the individual maps, geo-rectified them, removed the colors, and assembled them in a single raster shape file. We chose to save it in ".ecw" format to have a light version of the map for use in GIS software and on the internet (as in Live Maps on Virtual Shanghai: labeled as "1989 - Shanghai Business atlas".

Our purpose was to create a base raster map to be used for digitally redrawing the whole street network in the 1989 municipality to make up for the lack of map coverage in the two editions (1939, 1947)  of the Shanghai shi hanghao lutu lu 上海市行號路圖錄. The street network in 1989 Shanghai (the survey was actually done in 1987) was fundamentally unchanged. The names of the street were for the most part the same, even if numerous changes were introduced to remove traces of foreign presence, references to religion, etc. The 1989 Shanghai shi shangyong ditu ce 上海市商用地圖冊 provided less details in terms of street number (the Shanghai shi hanghao lutu lu 上海市行號路圖錄 recorded each street number on all streets). It was enough, however, to use for identiyfing and placing full addresses for buildings and lanes (lilong/里弄) , even in the past.

The .ecw file will not display automatically on QGIS. You will need to convert it as a geotiif file. If you need help with the procedure, check out this site. The procedure is simple.

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