Sprol

It’s not easy to find Chendu or Chengdu on Google Maps, even though it is the capital of Sichuan, one of China’s most populous provinces. With a population of about 4 million, it is growing fast, like many parts of China today. You can see the growth during the 1990s reflected in the orange portion of the above map.

The below map was the best I could get out of Google Maps. You can see the lush valley that explains why this is China’s most populous province. The yellow box is the area pictured in the maps above.

I eventually found the city by looking it up on Encarta, which has a decent if Microsofty homework-oriented online atlas that works in Firefox. Then I plugged those coordinates into Google Maps to generate these images. If you grew up in Chengdu, this is what your part of the world would look like when you imagined yourself on a giant map.

Don’t the Himalayas look beautiful? Check out how they affect the climate by redirecting the jet stream to the north and south. The US Consulate in Chengdu also counts in their district the entire Tibetian Autonomous Region, whatever that means.

I read the whole Wikipedia article and though I know all of the words that they’re using, they’re organized in sentences, etc, I still didn’t understand it. Stuff like this bothers me. Everyone knows that the Chinese Army occupies Tibet.

Of course if you are Google Maps the world apparently looks a bit different.