Chongqing, China, 重庆，Shapingba District, 沙坪坝区 Google Maps in Chinese
A Chinese friend randomly sent me her GPS coordinates. She was on a highway, deep within Sichuan province, just outside of Chongqing. Because Chongqing, with a population greater than the whole population of Canada, 30.1M people (2015), is so huge, this meant that she was just on the outskirts of the city. Mapping her GPS coordinates, between Google and Baidu maps, was, as usual, confusing. Here is the exercise.
The original coordinates sent to me were 29.656019,106.444153, or 29°39’21.7″N 106°26’39.0″E, 7PX8MC4V+CM. 沙坪坝区 Shapingba My Windows PC returned this URL: https://www.google.com/maps/place/29°39’21.7″N+106°26’39.0″E/@29.650779,106.3959376,12z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x0:0x0!8m2!3d29.656019!4d106.444153?hl=zh-CN
Jufuyuan Gongyu hotel, Xinjian Cun, Daxing Qu, Beijing, China fire, killed 17 people. 2017 Nov 19. Prompted Beijing to expel migrant workers. Hotel front door. New Image taken between Nov 19 and Dec 04. Image updated 2017 Dec 03. Pretty impressive, Baidu
The big fire in Xinjian Cun, Daxing District, Beijing, China at the Jufuyuan Gongyu Hotel killed 19 people, and sparked the forced expulsion of migrant workers in Xinjian Cun, followed by the destruction of all buildings. It was a tragic event that followed with some heavy handed government clampdown on migrant workers. For sure migrant workers deserve to be treated better, but after seeing some images I now wonder about the circumstances of the fire. Seventeen people were killed, and that is tragic, but the aftermath might also be 10s of thousands of migrant workers expelled from Beijing.
China, Guangdong Province, Kaiping City, west 8km, Nanyang Village (Lougang). Google Maps
A friend said his ancestral village was in China, Guangdong Province, Kaiping City, Changsha District and mentioned something about Lougang as the village name. The Google map he sent me was confusing, in that yes, it was Guangdong Province, but not exactly close to Kaiping City. I investigated.
Speaking Chinese and English, it is what I do. As my mother tongue is English and I live in Toronto, Canada, it was natural for me to post in English and use Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and other English biased search engines. I also have the ability to speak and write in Chinese, so I often do bilingual posts just for fun. As I regularly monitor my raw access server log, I can see that Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Sogou, 360, Yandex and other search engines regularly index my content. I wondered how well they index my posts, and if there are any hints and tips that might make getting my content indexed better.
Maps, I do like. Not only are they pretty, they are pretty useful, especially if you are unfamiliar with the area. Map and compass in hand, you can walk at your leisure and not get lost, or at least be able to get help from the locals when you do. But which maps are the best for China? I thought I’d do a map slugfest, comparing Google (line and satellite), 360, Sougou and Baidu. I chose 150 meters of Shandong, Changdao on Jiefang (Liberation) Road as an example.
Spare time, I had, and wanted to see where someone was physically located in China. The place is a small town on the border of Shanxi and Inner Mongolia, on the Yellow River. What were the odds that I could find her exact location and get a satellite photo of her building?
I started using Google Maps, which was pretty helpful. Considering that Google is not allowed in China, they still had maps of the small city and specifically the 1km section of road that interested me. The sat photo showed great detail, as you can see, but the roads from the diagram did not coordinate very well with the sat map. In fact they were really so far off that some roads went underwater, like tunnels.
