G&C Maps Page has been spiffed up with new additions.
One comes from the very good overview article Second Sino-Japanese War, which provides discussion, illustration, maps, links to video, and references.
"Japanese Empire's Territorial Expansion" clearly shows the location and year of each move, beginning with the 1874 taking of the Ryukyu Islands, which include Okinawa, and moving on and up through the 1931 invasion of Manchuria and 1939 of Haiman. This illustrates the historical setting of what the US and Allies considered the China Theater of the Pacific War of WWII.
What a relief it was to find a couple of good, readable river maps. This map of the Yellow River (Huang He) shows very clearly the course of the river, its tributaries and basin, basic regional topography, important cities, and surrounding regions. Hsian/Xian, at the junction of the Wei and Jing tributaries, was the OSS center of forward operations in the history we are considering.
One city, part of our story, that is not on this map is Kaifeng. That would be the mysterious Kaifeng-on-the-Dollar-Bill, of which we may or may not ever figure out the meaning.
Kaifeng is located east of Zhengzhou, right at the place where the Yellow River bends to the northeast.
The source of this map is an essay that goes into a lot of detail, on historical courses of the river, for example, or the deliberate 1938 KMT flooding of the Yellow River valley to deter Japanese troops.
A map of the Yangtze has similar advantages in clarity, showing just enough detail of the course, drainage basin, geographical relation to the Yellow and the Pearl Rivers, geographical relation to Tibet, India, Burma, and the coast. It shows us Kunming and Hsian/Xian, clearly and on the same map.
Last but not least, a 1959 set of topographical maps of eastern and southern China is available for download from the University of Texas Libraries. The master map looks like this:
From the landing page, I clicked on Hsian from the list of major place-names, zoomed in a bit, and took a screenshot of the ancient city and the rivers nearby:
This kind of reading and map study is useful in reminding us of the who-what-when-where of the broader stage and action in which fits our JACKAL story, to which we return.
