The scope of city walls

Most Chinese cities built city walls during the Ming and Qing Dynasties (1368-1911). The scope of the city walls reflected the urban boundaries at that time. This paper describes a methodology to rebuild the urban boundaries of China of 15^th-19^th centuries by restoring the scope of their city walls. Firstly, the year of construction or reconstruction of the city walls could be obtained through collection and sorting of the historical <i>Local Chronicles</i> materials. Secondly, specialization of the scope of the city wall could be conducted based on the urban morphology method, and variety of documentation. Correlation and integration of the lifetime and the spatial data would produce the spatio-temporal dataset of the scope of city wall areas. Based on the proximity to the time of most of the city walls built, we generated the 15^th-19^th centuries urban boundary dataset of China in six representative years (i.e., 1400, 1537, 1648, 1708, 1787, and 1866). This dataset would contribute to research areas such as global change and land use change.