Sources

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Most of the coastlines and national outlines are originally Natural Earth, except China's, which is derived from the Republican province sheet below and nothing else; China's provinces are the real ones of 1928–45; Korea is the National Institute of Korean History's thirteen colonial provinces rather than modern units; the princely states of India were georeferenced by hand from a 1931 atlas; and the occupied zone and the line of control are traced from period maps and are approximations, as they say on the map itself.

Boundaries and coastlines

Rivers

Japanese Occupations and the line of control

Projection. The map is drawn on a Pacific-centred frame running 66°E–206°E and 13°S–55°N — British India to Pearl Harbor, Sakhalin to northern Australia. Longitudes are normalised to 0–360 so the map is continuous across the antimeridian. Three projections are offered in Layers, and the map is re-projected in the browser rather than re-fetched:

Transport

Taiwan Railways These were primarily based on the 日治時期鐵路分布圖 (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Taiwan) 0703b which was reprojected to TWD97. The map seems to align quite closely with historical maps where drawn. However, this map was missing several things needed for the 1930 and 1942 maps. The Hualien to Taidong line was added for both 1930 and 1942. The Hualien 1939 port extension for the 1942 map and a missing coastal station was added for 海岸驛 at 南濱 for the 1930 map. Part of the 宜蘭 line in the north was missing, as was its branch line to 菁桐坑. The 集集線 and 明治製糖南投線 departing east out of 二水 were also added to both maps. All of these were traced from 1944 1944-美軍地形圖-1:25,000 : AM25K_1944A. 東港 line and 溪州/南州—枋寮 lines in the south are kept for 1942, removed for 1930 map. There are a variety of lines found on railway maps that are lines for sugar refineries and mines but some of these carried passengers. This dataset may need to be updated to take that in to account and better represent the full network.

Korea Railways The Korean railways make use of the 근대 철도 DB dataset by 김종혁. 「근대 철도 DB」, 2027년 8월. The lines were filtered for those created before 1931 for the 1930 map and those created before 1943 for the 1942 map. The stations were clipped as needed for each. The dataset has not yet been closely checked with contemporary maps for accuracy. Japanese names were romanized through a combination of best-guess automated romanization and looking for entries online through Japanese Wikipedia etc. This work needs to be done more methodically from scratch for better accuracy. Hangul names were romanized for McCune-Reischauer.

Train Tools, Taiwan 1936 The working timetable behind the Train Tools is the transcription published at kmlawson.github.io/taiwan-1936-timetable, taken from the February 1936 timetable of the Railway Department of the Governor-General of Taiwan (臺灣總督府交通局鐵道部), which can be read at the Internet Archive. It carries 346 trains over the seven passenger lines, with 5,372 calls between them, and the track between consecutive stops. The eighteen printed tables are reproduced whole at the timetable page, and a station's card links to the table for its line. That page reads in English, Chinese or Japanese at the press of a button — the title, the links, the legend and the headings, but never the tables, which are a transcription and are left as printed; the column headings are translated in English only, with the printed word kept on the cell. Station names there carry their reading on a second line, kana in Japanese and Mandarin with tone marks otherwise, from the same station table the map uses.

Station readings Japanese readings are only ever taken from a source that states them in kana, never worked out from the characters — 萬里橋 is Maribashi and 鹿野 is Shikano, and no amount of on-yomi gets you there. tools/fetch_tw_station_readings.py takes the furigana from the lede of a ja.wikipedia station article and converts the kana by table; where there is no article, or none with furigana, the reading is left empty and marked unverified rather than guessed. 「駅名読み方大全」 is the other source consulted: it gives a 駅名一覧表 with kana for every station on a line, and it covers Karafuto — 樺太東線, 樺太西線, 川上線 and 豊真線 — from which 敷香 しくか and 真岡 まおか are taken. Its 台湾地区 and 朝鮮地区 sections exist but are empty as of September 2026, so Taiwan's fifty-two unread stations are still waiting on a source.

Train Tools, Korea 1938 The Korean network behind the Train Tools is transcribed from 朝鮮列車時刻表 (1938), a 朝鮮・滿洲・內地 pocket timetable carrying the revisions of December 1937 and January 1938, which can be read at the Internet Archive. It carries 1,666 trains over 74 lines calling at 1,302 stations, 695 of them placed from the NIKH historical GIS of Korean railways (checked by 김종혁), with the track between consecutive stops traced along the 1942 line geometry. The 173 printed tables are reproduced whole at the timetable page, and a station's card links to the table for its line. The Manchurian and Japanese pages and the four ferries are carried as the network the Korean tables connect to: their stations sit at the point of a city this map already draws and the track between them is a straight chord, so they are drawn faint, say so on their cards, and are off until the reader asks for them. The pages were transcribed by Claude Code's vision model and have not yet been checked by a human; that is planned, and corrections are welcome.

Japan Railways - The Japanese lines for 1930 and 1942 are filtered from the dataset provided by the 国土交通省国土数値情報ダウンロードサイト. The source's survey begins in 1950, so railways that closed before 1950 are likely to be missing from the data. A line or a station is drawn on a date when its 供用開始年 — the year service began — is that date or earlier: 1,806 lines and 10,639 stations on the 1930 map, and with the 171 lines and 2,161 stations opened between 1931 and 1942, 1,977 and 12,800 on the December 1942 map. Press a line for its name and the year it opened, or a station for the same. 915 of the 1,977 lines carry a link to their Wikipedia article — the English one where there is one and the Japanese one otherwise — and 910 a romanisation, which is taken from the article's own title or the reading in its lede and never worked out from the characters; a line without one is shown by its characters alone. The card leads with the romanisation, or with the characters where Kanji labels is on. The drawn course is thinned to 40 m, which keeps 83,829 of the source's 877,918 vertices and is about a screen pixel at the closest the map will go.

Burma Railways - The railways of Burma are traced for this map and drawn on both dates: thirty lines, 6,081 km of route, and the metre-gauge network had reached its full extent in the 1920s, so it stood in December 1942 where it stood in 1930 — under Japanese control by then, and with bridges down, but the rails in the same places. Lines only. The trace names neither the lines nor the stations, so there is nothing to press and no stations are drawn; the layer is the shape of the network and claims no more than that. 560 of its 586 vertices survive the build.

Karafuto Railways and Timetable The railway lines were first traced from 最新樺太地圖 附全樺太及北海道略圖 but these did not provide enough detail. The line was corrected by examining remnant contemporary train lines and tracks from the ESRI Satellite layer. This still left considerable ambiguities in the area between 手井 in the west and 豊原 in the east. Then an inspection of the detailed 樺太路線図 at 時刻表倉庫 suggested that this had been done with significant care, so this source was used to further correct and update the lines layer, with occasional consultation with the 1947 U.S. Army Map Eastern Siberia maps cited by the 時刻表倉庫 as a source. The timetables for the railway come from 樺太国有鉄道列車時刻表 1935. The fourteen printed tables are reproduced whole at the timetable page. Station names in the 1935 timetable, which was OCRed and reassembled with Claude Fable 5.1, were then manually proofread against the 1947 U.S. Army Map to check the names and locations. Some of the station locations have no extant buildings on satellite, and in these cases I have followed the 時刻表倉庫 locations for them.

Air routes The Tokyo–Dairen trunk on the 1930 sheet is timed from the company's own 昭和五年四月改正 定期航空発着時刻及賃金表 (April 1930): two days each way with a night at Keijō in both directions, no service on Sundays, and the Osaka and Fukuoka calls made by seaplane at Kizugawajiri and Najima. Its fare table is the one this map carries — all twenty-one figures agree with the reading taken from 酒井正子's article, which is a check on both. The other services are drawn from 酒井正子「変容する世界の航空界・その4 日本の航空100年」, which reproduces the Japan Air Transport network and, on p101, the October 1938 – March 1939 timetable, citing 『航空輸送の歩み』大日本航空社史刊行会編, 1975, p65. The Tokyo–Dairen trunk's 1931 times are from the summer diagram in the same article; the fares from the same source add up leg by leg, which is what proves the reading of a printed triangle whose rows and columns are only implied by position. The Fukuoka–Naha–Taihoku line's opening and its first three-day-a-week schedule are from JACAR C05034292500 海軍省-公文備考-S10-78-4892 (1935), and a 1938 note on its aircraft, fares and the mail-only Tainan–Makō leg from 旅程と費用概算, p893. The Yokohama–Saipan–Palau flying boat's April 1939 schedule is from JACAR C01007343400 陸軍省-大日記乙輯-S14-13-41.

The Dutch networks on the 1942 sheet are two documents, both older than the map they are drawn on. The KLM trunk from Amsterdam is the summer service of 29 March 1938, which the frame catches from Karachi eastward — four days to Bandoeng, leaving Karachi on Mondays, Thursdays and Saturdays. The twenty-six KNILM lines across the Indies — twenty-five inside them and one out to Manila — are from the Complete Map of the Airlines of K.N.I.L.M. of about 1935, which is a route map and not a timetable: the lines are drawn and nothing is said about when they flew. By December 1942 neither network was running — the Japanese had taken the Indies that spring — and each card says so. They are drawn to show what had been there.

The 1930 sheet carries three lines of the China National Aviation Corporation (中國航空公司), the Nationalist government's joint venture with Pan American: the lower Yangtze from Shanghai to Hankow, on up through the gorges to Chungking, and north up the coast to Peiping. They are read from the company's own timetable of about 1933 — the Yangtze services and the Chungking and Peiping routes — so they are three years later than the sheet they are drawn on, which is the nearest schedule found. On the Chungking line the source gives two departures a week and three returns, and the card says so.

Three European lines are here too. Air Orient's Marseilles–Saigon service, from its summer 1931 sheet, and Imperial Airways' India end from 16 May 1931, both on the 1930 map; and on the 1942 one, Imperial's August 1939 services to Darwin and to Calcutta, and Air France's 1938 line to Hong Kong. The last two run on across ground that was Japanese-held by December 1942 — Rangoon, Singapore, Saigon, Hanoi — and those stretches are drawn faint, kept out of the animation and still pressable, because leaving them off would say the network stopped where in fact only the sheet stops. Air Orient's and Air France's clocks are inferred from distance and are marked as such on every call.

Indian National Airways is on both sheets from the same collection of timetables: the Calcutta–Rangoon coast run and the Calcutta–Dacca shuttle on the 1930 map, from the sheet of 10 December 1933, and the Delhi–Karachi trunk down the Indus on the 1942 one, from November 1938. Their clocks are Indian standard time, as every line here keeps the local time of the country that flew it.

The 1930 sheet also carries two lines outside the Japanese and Chinese networks: the Philippine Aerial Taxi Company's hour from Manila up to the hill station at Baguio, from an undated brochure of about the mid-1930s — its card names the Paracale, INAEC and Philippine Air Lines services that followed and are not drawn — and the Aerial Transport Company of Siam's mail line up the Khorat plateau to the Mekong, from its 1933 timetable, which is two services on one line and is drawn as two.

A fifth 1930 line runs down the whole China coast — Shanghai to Canton by Wenchow, Foochow, Amoy and Swatow — which opened in October 1933 and is timed here from the company's 1935 schedule, the one found. Three more CNAC lines are on the 1942 sheet, from the company's October 1940 timetable: Chungking to Rangoon by Kunming and Lashio — the air equivalent of the Burma Road, and the one route out of free China once the coast had gone — and two provincial services, the Chengtu shuttle and the line up to Kiating.

Three lines of the Manchuria Aviation Company (満洲航空株式会社) are on the 1942 sheet from the company's winter 1935 timetable: the trunk from Harbin down through Shinkyō and Mukden to Dairen; the west line out along the Chinese Eastern Railway to the Soviet frontier at Manchouli, which is really two services and is drawn as two; and the pre-dawn run from Shinkyō to Shingishū that was the Manchurian end of the through service to Tokyo. Seven years earlier than the sheet, and each card says so.

The four China Airways lines on the 1942 sheet — Peking to Shanghai, to Dairen, west to Paotow, and the Yangtze services to Hankow — are read from the company's own 1940 timetable. 中華航空株式會社 was set up in December 1938, a joint concern of 大日本航空 and the Japanese-sponsored governments at Peking and Nanking. The brochure prints its places in characters only; 安慶 Anking is identified from the distance column, whose three Yangtze legs sum to the figure given for the nonstop and match the real spacing to within five per cent. Tientsin is marked as a call on two of the lines with no clock against it, and the times drawn there are inferred from the printed ends and distances — each card says which. The whole transcription is in data/air/README.md.

Also consulted: Mizusawa Hikari, "The Civilian Air Transportation Network that Linked Japan with Its Colonies", JACAR.

The July 1942 sheet. The aviation pages (118–121) of 満州支那汽車時間表 (Manshū Shina kisha jikanhyō), Japan's railway timetable for Manchuria, July 1942 issue (昭和17年7月號), photographed for this project, carry 滿洲航空's tables as revised on 1 June 1942 and 中華航空's as revised on 1 April 1942 — thirty-four lines, from the Shinkyō–Tokyo through flight to the Amur frontier posts of Huma and Mohe. They are on the 1942 map beside the winter-1935 and 1940 readings, not in their place, and every one is marked as that sheet's: the company string on the chooser and the card ends "July 1942 sheet" or "April 1942 sheet", the season names the 改正 stamp, and each has an ink of its own. Nine of the tables are headed 運休 (suspended); those are drawn dimmed with their printed times and are not flown. data/air/README.md has the reading, and its two awkward tables — a zigzag through Paoching, a misprinted distance — are explained there.

Download the geometry

The map's own shapes, in lon/lat as GeoJSON, for opening in QGIS or anything else. These are written before projection and before any thinning — they are what the map means rather than what it happens to look like at one scale — and they carry the atom key and the unit name, so a file can be joined to the tables above.

The shaded relief

Not geometry — nine images, one for each of three levels of detail in each of the map's three projections, and the map fetches whichever pair the reader's zoom and projection ask for. They are here as direct downloads because there is nothing else to hand over: a raster has no shapes to write.

They are already projected, so each is only true of the projection in its name; the extent is the map's own frame. Derived from public-domain elevation data — see the note above on the relief.

MercatorAlbersLambert azimuthal
coarse364 KB252 KB312 KB
fine968 KB580 KB812 KB
finest1.4 MB976 KB1.2 MB

Licences follow the sources each shape came from — most are Natural Earth (public domain), geoBoundaries (CC BY), OpenStreetMap (ODbL) or the datasets named above; the traced layers are this project's own. Check the entry for the shape you are using.

For a single shape, ask the map. Right-click any polygon (or press and hold on a touch screen) and it offers that unit, its group where it has one, and the whole layer it belongs to — along with the coordinates under the pointer and a short note on where the shape came from. Those files are the drawn geometry and carry the thinning the map draws at; the files above do not, which is why both exist.

Software

Georeferencing of various historical maps done with QGIS. Website code created with Anthropic's Claude, with Konrad Lawson at the prompt. No third-party JavaScript libraries: the page is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the build scripts use only the Python standard library.

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