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I'm looking for good free online sources of vector data on China (shapefiles of cities, provinces, terrain etc). Would anyone be able to suggest where to look? Are there any open repositories of this type of data? Raster suggestions are welcome too.

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7 Answers

up vote 13 down vote

Open Street Map appears to have pretty comprehensive coverage of China's transportation and political boundaries. You can download a zip file of Chinese OSM shapefiles from Cloudmade at:

http://downloads.cloudmade.com/asia/eastern_asia/china#downloads_breadcrumbs

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OpenStreetMap is a great source for vector data, however beware that you need to share any derivative works according to their data licensing. I posted a related question on the subject. – Jaime Soto Dec 1 '10 at 18:09
up vote 11 down vote

Digital Chart of the World - DCW (China) http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/data/dcw/

Admin Boundaries (e00 format) http://sedac.ciesin.org/china/admin/bnd90/bnd90.html

Open Street Map #OSM n shapefile format

downloads.cloudmade.com/asia/china/china.shapefiles.zip (same as jvangled)

Digital Terrain Elevation Data (DTED) http://data.geocomm.com/catalog/CH/group121.html

Admin BNDS https://research.cip.cgiar.org/gis/modules.php?name=Downloads&d_op=viewdownload&cid=11&min=20&orderby=titleA&show=10

Boundaries http://citas.csde.washington.edu/data/cntybnd/overview.htm

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does any one still use e00 files? can anything still read them? – iant♦ Dec 1 '10 at 16:10
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yes > Import from .e00 [ArcGIS 10] (Conversion) help.arcgis.com/en/arcgisdesktop/10.0/help/index.html#//… – Mapperz♦ Dec 1 '10 at 18:09
It looks like ogr2ogr allow's you to convert e00 files directly. Otherwise, if you don't have an ArcInfo license (required to import e00 files in ArcGIS), consider using the Import71.exe utility by ESRI. It is a standalone utility (no ESRI software needed) that was created for use back in the ArcView 3 days. Of course then you would need to convert to shapefile or other. – RyanDalton Jan 12 '11 at 16:31
up vote 2 down vote

Global Administrative Areas also has a nice multi-level dataset :

http://www.gadm.org

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up vote 1 down vote

It is not shapefiles but if you can read Chinese, then Environment and Ecological Science Data Centre for West China http://westdc.westgis.ac.cn/ might be of help. Although it says West China but many datasets are countrywide. Has things like landcover, vegetation, locations of glaciers and so forth. The catalog is a bit messy though...

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up vote 1 down vote

After trial, the best free resources are:

The best non-free ressource is :

  • www.fas.harvard.edu/~chgis/data/chgis/downloads/v4/
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up vote 1 down vote

For rast data (elevation models, satellite imagery etc), check http://grass.osgeo.org/wiki/Global_datasets (China is large enough... and even high-res maps are listed there).

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up vote 0 down vote

Could this be of help? Map data for all of the world: http://www.naturalearthdata.com/

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