In 1602, the Wanli Emperor of the Ming dynasty had a big task for his scholars: a map that would depict the entire world. The ...

Another map superimposes the outline of the empire over present-day boundaries, including the entirety of China, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and many smaller states as well as large swathes of Russia.

Beijing maintains that these, and five other, territories were unduly handed to Tsarist Russia in a bout of treaties that saw Moscow strip China of 350,000 square miles of land during the nineteenth ...

Historical land use reconstructions provide critical insights, not only into past agricultural practices and settlement patterns but also into the feedbacks between land cover and climate systems.