OXAV
Partyline
Hydrological Atlas of China

This project maps China's major watersheds and collects them into an atlas that offers an alternative reading of the Chinese landscape. By swapping out the country's political boundaries with those of its drainage basins, this project rearranges the traditional cartographic order to highlight hidden hydrological relationships. Whereas political maps do not draw a connection between two administratively and politically separate areas; the ambition of these maps is to reveal the natural systems that bind these places to one another. Two simple techniques are employed toward these ends: masking areas outside each basin to focus the viewer's attention, and the 90-degree rotation of each map - aligning the page to the west-to-east flow of China's major rivers - to emphasize each basin's dominant riverine network.
These intra-watershed relationships are central to China's struggle to urbanize amidst increasingly dire water shortages. These maps enable the viewer to see past the man-made divisions that commonly define national atlases and focus on a system key to addressing the country's - and increasingly the region's - looming environmental problems.

Bash scripts import data into PostgreSQL/PostGIS tables that feed into QGIS stylesheets. Adobe Illustrator was used to finalize layouts and make manual label adjustments. The project was presented at the 2015 meetings of both the Association of American Geographers (AAG) and North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). In 2016, the Yellow River Basin map was selected for inclusion in NACIS's bi-annual Atlas of Design publication.
Yellow River Basin, overview




Lower Yangtze River Basin, detail




Upper Yangtze River Basin, detail




Liao River Basin, detail




SE Coastal Basin, detail




Hai River Basin, detail