Provinces
and other province-level administrative regions
of the
People's Republic of China
中华人民共和国
organized by geographic region
-
There are four principal types of region:
-
the Province ('Sheng' 省),
-
the province-level municipality ('Shih' 市)
),
-
the Autonomous Region (labeled "A.R.") ('Zizhiju'
自治区) which theoretically gives various
ethnic minorities control over their own affairs.
-
the Special Administrative Region (特别行政区)
-
Provinces do not nest neatly into geographic regions; in a few cases I
have had to "pick" one.
-
The preferred romanization is the Pinyin system devised by the Chinese
government. My initial source for this writeup, a 1970 Times
Atlas of China, used a mixture of the older Wade-Giles system and
the even older Post Office System. After using the atlas's W-G/Pinyin
table and scanning a few websites I was able to find all of the current
spellings, (as well as changes to the list made since 1970). If the
atlas used a different spelling for an area's name, it follows the Pinyin
spelling in parentheses.
"
Manchuria"
North China Plain
Yangtze River Basin
Southern Coast
Mountainous West
Also:
Gritchka had the
effrontery to correct four mistakes I made,
curse him.
curses also to
dharmaraja for another correction.
Many, many thanks to shro0m for the idea of labeling provinces with Chinese characters. These were found (for the most part) on http://cn.yahoo.com/regional/countries_and_regions/mainland_china/provinces__regions_and_municipalities/, then converted to entities using tongpoo's wonderful little javascript in Using Unicode on E2. Many thanks again to dharmaraja for proofreading them.
Now, give your accolades to dharmaraja's fabulous writeup, which follows this one. I am in awe.