Urban built-up area of 14-19th centuries in China

This dataset rebuilds the built-up areas of Chinese cities of 14th-19th centuries by restoring the time and the scope of city walls. Through the collection and sorting of the Local Chronicles materials, the construction and reconstruction time of each city wall is obtained. The period in which the scope of the city wall unchanged is recorded as a lifetime of the city’s built-up area. Based on the urban morphology method, the Local Chronicles materials, the military topographic map of the first half of the 20th century, and remote sensing images of the 1970s are used to spatialize the scope of the city wall. Finally, by correlating and integrating the spatial data of the city wall scope and the lifetime data of the urban built-up area, the spatio-temporal dataset of urban built-up areas of 14th-19th centuries in China is produced. This dataset is of great significance in the research fields such as global change and land use change.