The dataset of walled cities and urban extent in late imperial China in 15th-19th centuries

We reconstruct the walled cities for China that extend back from 15th century to 19th century based on multiple historical documents. Cities in late imperial China (the Ming and the Qing Dynasties, 1368-1911) generally had city walls, and these walls were usually built around the urban built-up area. By restoring the scope of the city walls, it is helpful to explore the urban extend in this period Firstly, we collected the years of construction or reconstruction of city walls from the historical data. Specifically, the period in which the scope of the city wall keeps unchanged is recorded as a lifetime of it. Secondly, specialization of the scope of the city wall could be conducted based on the urban morphology method, and variety of documentation, including the historical literature materials, the military topographic maps of the first half of the 20th century, and the remote sensing images of the 1970s. Correlation and integration of the lifetime and the spatial data would produce China City Wall Areas Dataset (CCWAD) in late imperial. Based on the proximity to the time of most of the city walls, we selected six representative years (i.e., 1400, 1537, 1648, 1708, 1787, and 1866) from CCWAD to produce China Urban Extent Dataset (CUED) in the 15th-19th centuries. <br>