This is a situation map of China’s four-decade revolution — the maps that hung in warlord yamens, in the Japanese General Staff, in Mao’s cave at Yan’an and Chiang’s bomb-shelter capital at Chungking, redrawn month by month. It opens in 1911 with the Qing empire dying and the edges — Mongolia, Tibet — already breaking away. Then the fracture: a republic that becomes a market of armies, a map of grey-tan cliques. Then the storm: Manchuria charcoal in 1931, the coast in 1937–38 — and the two answers to it, the blue government trading space for time up the Yangtze, and a red base area in the loess hills that grows in the war’s shadow until, in 1949, it floods the whole map.
Twelve chapters argue the era rather than merely recount it: why the republic failed, what May Fourth changed, how a party of thirteen survived annihilation to win a state of five hundred million — and how the Japanese war decided a Chinese civil war. Every battle, arrow and boundary is drawn where it happened. Take the guided tour, or scrub the timeline and interrogate the map yourself.
Keys: ←→ chapters · space play time · +− zoom · 0 reset.