During my recent internet explorations, I stumbled upon a fascinating website: Soviet Military Maps of China. I was taken aback by what I found. This collection consists of 381 declassified map sheets, originally part of the Soviet Union's military mapping of China. The creator has georeferenced these maps and built them into an online WebGIS. I tested it myself and confirmed it can also be loaded in QGIS and ArcGIS Pro.

About Soviet Military Maps of China

The data source for Soviet Military Maps of China is part of the Soviet mapping system, at a scale of 1:200,000. The coverage is extensive, divided into map sheets. The maps typically contain features like contour lines, terrain, water systems, roads, and settlements. Most of the annotations are in Russian, representing a classic example of high-precision topographic mapping from the Cold War era.

Website: https://sovietatlas.monarcha.ai/

Key Highlights

First is the high information density. Many old roads, bridges, mines, and settlements that may have disappeared from modern maps are often clearer on these historical topographic sheets. Zooming into almost any area reveals numerous details.

Second, they are excellent for spatiotemporal comparison. Overlaying these historical topographic maps with modern satellite imagery makes changes in place names, river courses, and urban expansion.

Third, they are very GIS-friendly. The online viewer lowers the barrier to entry, and after extracting the service URL, I found it loads easily in both QGIS and ArcGIS.

For example, the image above shows the topographic map for Xi'an, drawn with remarkable detail.

Opening in QGIS

Currently, the website offers limited functionality, primarily just transparency adjustment and base map type switching.

I suggest using the plugin introduced in a previous article, "Geo Hound: A Tool to Automatically Fetch Website Map Service Addresses," to extract the service URL.

QGIS Address:

https://sovietatlas.monarcha.ai/api/tiles/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

ArcGIS Address:

https://sovietatlas.monarcha.ai/api/tiles/{level}/{col}/{row}.png

The loading result in QGIS is shown below:

The loading result in ArcGIS Pro is shown below:

Conclusion

If you are interested in historical maps, topographic sheets, or are working on topics like urban expansion, river course changes, or transportation evolution, I highly recommend bookmarking this site. Its greatest value lies not only in its rarity but in transforming these information-rich historical maps into a readily accessible online resource that is also highly compatible with desktop GIS software like ArcGIS Pro and QGIS. For those interested, it's definitely worth exploring.

Finally, if you know of any other interesting map websites, please feel free to share them!