The beta stage site is here.
The Motivation
During the Qing dynasty, the large network of postal and military stations, connecting the ruling kernel with China proper, Manchuria, Mongolia, Sinkiang, and Tibet, were venues of information and military logistics for monitoring the empire, and also routes which officials, scholars, merchants traveled. I felt that if I could transform the system into a GIS database, it would be an invaluable research foundation on which future investigations into Qing commercial or cultural history could be built. My project since then has been one of retracing these routes. I will give a very brief technical overview of the backstage process here, and more blogs concerning specific routes will be posted in the coming months(most likely in Chinese).
Data Aggregation
The main primary source that I used was The Jiaqing Administrative Code of the Qing Dynasty (Jiaqing Huidian 嘉慶會典). My initial plan was to extract the information using OCR and then geocoding the raw data with a Google API. However, most of the OCR software that I tried was quite abysmal at discerning Chinese characters that were oriented vertically. I tinkered around a lot with various software parameters and have even thought of writing my own OCR specialized for this purpose but to no avail. In the end, I decided that for my data size, it was faster to have a flawed OCRed result and then eyeball the data for corrections. Geocoding was also pretty challenging: the Google API could only identify place names that had not changed since the Qing period and I had to do a lot of textual research in travel logs and gazettes to uncover the present-day location. For anyone interested, Xiao fang hu zhai yu di cong chao (小方壺齋輿地叢鈔) is a good source to look into.