Spatiotemporal Evolution of Market Towns in the Jiangnan Area During the Ming-Qing Dynasties of China

In this article, the authors present a spatiotemporal model for elucidating the evolution of market towns spanning from before 1550 to 1980. The study area, Jiangnan (i.e., current Shanghai and Suzhou cities area), with its flat elevation and compact river network, is the best place to evaluate the dynamic hierarchical change of the market towns in China. The population and the geographical location of each market town are manually extracted from a large quantity of historical literature. A geographical information system, spatial statistics, and the Shannon entropy are utilized for capturing the growth or decline of market towns and examining the spatial and hierarchical relationships of the market towns. The proposed methods can be easily extended to other historical research.