Cartography reports today that the entirety of China has been mapped at a scale of 1:50,000. All land areas were mapped; datasets include elevation, imagery, terrain, hydrology, transportation, boundaries, and geographic names. The database also delineates farmland, forest land, grassland, residential areas, and industrial land. One meter aerial imagery covers large and medium sized cities. From the People’s Daily Online report…
"Li Weisen, told the press conference that as supervisor of surveying and mapping, the bureau will try its best to make the database available to all while taking security into consideration."
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is there a map of China for Garmin GPS?
AFAIK, there is not. There’s the Garmin worldwide basemap (http://www.garmin.com/cartography/mapSource/WM.jsp). If you go to the website, you can use their map viewer to see the level of detail offered. It’s got major highways and cities, and is actually better than I thought it would be.
There is apparently a free version (see http://www.gpspassion.com/forumsen/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=64350). I haven’t tried this, so please let me know if you do and how it works out.
Watch out for bad third-party maps (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4270922.stm)!
Otherwise, I think you’d have to create your own.
HTH
I recently went to all the trouble and researched possible maps in China. The only solution I found (apart from Shinco which was only in Chinese) was Garmin. But a word of warning to you all…
After extensive research, and then going to their distributor in Shanghai, and many questions on if I can use their mapsourcing products (Everything was ok).
I get it home to install it and they inform me that they cannot support English mapping software on the pc. I am totally annoyed at this. (This ended up costing more than twice any other solution).
Yeah, I’m afraid we’re several years away from good international maps. It’s incredibly frustrating.
Just checking in on this subject. Are there still no good maps of China for Garmin units? Garmin appears to have Chinese versions of some units that are in use here in Beijing, but they still don’t seem to offer the maps separately. I’m looking for a street-level map of Beijing, and more cities if available.
Thanks!
Geoff,
Nothing official, but there are 40 China maps at MapCenter (http://mapcenter.cgpsmapper.com/catalogue.php?country=47).
Another place to look is Yunnan Explorer (http://www.yunnanexplorer.com/features/gpsmaps)
You might want to read this post too…
http://gpstracklog.com/2007/12/free-maps-for-y.html
HTH