Key
At the selected date, the colour of each place shows who held it. To learn its story, click or tap a country or marker.
Drag to move · scroll to zoom · click a country or marker
To move the map on a touch screen, drag it. Pinch to zoom, or double-tap to zoom in.
China’s revolution unfolded over four decades, and this situation map follows it month by month. It evokes the maps that hung in warlord yamens, in the Japanese General Staff, in Mao’s cave at Yan’an and in Chiang’s bomb-shelter capital at Chungking. The story opens in 1911, as the Qing empire is dying and its edges, Mongolia and Tibet, are already breaking away. A republic follows, but it becomes a market of armies: on the map, grey-tan cliques divide the country. Japan takes Manchuria in 1931 and the coast in 1937–38. The blue government responds by trading space for time up the Yangtze; a red base area in the loess hills grows in the shadow of the war. By 1949, red floods the whole map.
How did the republic fail, and what did May Fourth change? How did a party of thirteen survive annihilation and go on to win a state of five hundred million? The twelve chapters pursue these questions and examine how the Japanese war decided a Chinese civil war. Every battle, arrow and boundary is drawn where it happened. You can follow the guided tour, or scrub the timeline and interrogate the map yourself.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · ⌘K search · ? all keys.
You can return to the library of twenty-one atlases at any time: select the balloon at the top left.