MAPS OF HISTORY · HISTORY OF · People's Republic of China

ONE LAND · 8 ATLASES

People's Republic of China, on the map of history

What was People's Republic of China before it was People's Republic of China? Below, every era of this land in the Maps of History collection — who ruled it, what it was called, and when control changed — each line linked to the dated map that shows it. Modern borders stand in as an honest approximation; every atlas says so on the map itself.

China (Jin, then Song, then Yuan) · The Mongol Empire, 1206–1294

Two conquests in one country: the Jurchen Jin north, taken 1211–34 by absorbed siegecraft and defecting Khitans, and the Song south — the empire’s longest war (to 1279), won with navies, Persian trebuchets and Chinese administration. Khubilai’s Yuan reunified China after three centuries and moved its capital to Beijing, where it remains. Chinese history counts the conquerors as a legitimate dynasty; weigh what that absorption means.

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China · The Russian Revolution, 1905–1924

China, itself in revolution and warlord fragmentation after 1911, bordered the chaos and received a flood of White émigrés (Harbin became a Russian city-in-exile). The young Chinese Communist movement watched the Bolshevik victory closely; the Comintern would soon be at work in it.

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China (Tibet & Sinkiang) · Indian Independence & Partition, 1905–1948

China on this map is Tibet and Sinkiang — the high dead ground of the Great Game, where British India probed (Younghusband’s 1904 lance-charge to Lhasa) and republican China’s claims ran ahead of its reach. Tibet governed itself from 1913 behind the Himalayan wall the Raj was content to keep ambiguous (the McMahon Line of 1914, signed but never ratified by China, waits in these mountains). The ambiguity outlived the Raj: free India inherited the line, and 1962 collected the bill.

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China (the Republic, 1912–49) · China in Revolution, 1911–1949

The protagonist and the prize. In 1911 the Qing empire dissolves and its succession stays open for thirty-eight years: Yuan’s stillborn republic, a decade as a market of armies, a Nationalist state real enough to be worth capturing and hollow enough to be captured, an invasion that breaks it, and a peasant-based party-state that inherits everything. Every color this map has worn — blue, grey-tan, charcoal, red — is a claim on the same inheritance: the right to answer for China. The red that ends the atlas is not the end of the question; Taiwan, and the century since, are its continuation.

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People's Republic of China · The Great War, 1914–1918

China declared war in 1917, sending no soldiers but 140,000 laborers to the Western Front (Ch. 7) — its bid to recover German-held Shandong at the peace table. Versailles gave Shandong to Japan; the May Fourth movement of 1919 — nationalist, iconoclastic, radicalizing — is the direct answer. The Chinese Communist Party was founded two years later by men May Fourth made.

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People's Republic of China · The Road to War, 1931–1941

The war’s longest sufferer and quietest load-bearing wall. It absorbed Manchuria and Jehol for the sake of time, unified against Japan after Xi’an (1936), lost its coast, capital and best army — and did not surrender, pinning a million-man Japanese army from Chungking while the world decided whether to care. It ended 1941 an Allied great power; its endurance had made the “China Incident” unwinnable.

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People's Republic of China · The War Room — WW2, 1936–1945

The forgotten ally: at war from 1937, four years before Pearl Harbor, absorbing over half of Japan’s army at a cost of perhaps 20 million dead. The war’s end resolved nothing internally — civil war resumed, and the People’s Republic of 1949 was forged in the anti-Japanese struggle.

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People's Republic of China · The Cold War, 1945–1991

The era’s greatest variable: US-aligned in 1945, red in 1949 (the map’s largest single change), Moscow’s ally, then Moscow’s enemy — shooting at Soviet border posts by 1969 and toasting Nixon by 1972 (Ch. 9). Mao’s internal catastrophes — the Great Leap famine, the Cultural Revolution — killed tens of millions off this map’s cameras. It ended the era communist, market-reforming, and rising: the Cold War participant with the longest afterlife.

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