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About

Xiangcun Baike (乡村百科) is an encyclopedia of China's countryside. Every province, city, county, township, administrative village and natural village has its own article here, and registered users can write about their home places. Edits are published after a reviewer approves them.

Where articles come from

The basics of each place - its name, level, the area it belongs to, its statistical code, what lies under it and where it is on the map - come from public statistical and geographic data, so every place has a page even before anyone has written about it. The article text, the summary and the infobox fields such as population, area, dialect and local products are written by users.

Every edit is kept as a complete version. Edits wait in a review queue and appear on the article once a reviewer approves them; every approved version can be seen and compared under "History".

Adding a surname to a village, and placing a natural village under the administrative village it belongs to, take effect at once. Both are fully logged, and administrators can roll them back.

Data sources and credits

  • Provinces, prefectures and counties: Ministry of Civil Affairs, county-level and above division codes, 2025.
  • Townships and administrative villages (communities): National Bureau of Statistics, statistical division and urban-rural classification codes, 2023.
  • Names and positions of natural villages: © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database License (ODbL). The map tiles also come from OpenStreetMap, relayed through this site's server.
  • Positions of provinces, cities, counties and some townships: Wikidata (CC0).
  • Surnames of villages in Taishan, Kaiping, Xinhui, Zhongshan and Enping: the 1963 index of village surnames and related sources, as compiled by Friends of Roots VillageDB.
  • This place data was compiled by the place directory of chinazupu.com and copied to this site, where it is maintained separately.

Content license

Text written by users is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0): anyone may copy, adapt and republish it, with attribution and under the same license. The place data is used under the licenses of its sources.