Speaker: Ruoran Cheng, Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economics.

Ruoran Cheng will introduce his work on transport routes and costs in the Ming and Qing dynasties. Using techniques from geographic information science and data from historical route books, he has proposed a more accurate and comprehensive account of transport routes. Based on this and other data he has constructed the relative costs of different modes of transportation from 1202 to 1890. Currently, he is also working on the connection between trade potential proxied by natural routes and the location of economic activities proxied by archeological sites in China for a period spanning from Neolithic villages (7000 BP) to the unified empire (2000 BP)

Sponsored by the China Biographical Database Project, China Historical GIS, and the Digital China Initiative