Regionalizing Infrastructures started out with an attempt to map the construction and reconstruction of city walls on the basis of a sample of city wall inscriptions. Inscriptions commemorating wall construction and renovation (as well as destruction) are transcribed in many local gazetteers. We mapped city wall construction on the basis of a digital annotation of the inscriptions included in some 80 Ming gazetteers covering the modern provinces of Shaanxi, Henan, and Guangdong. You can read more about our methodological design and early findings in the 2020 issue of Ming Studies here.
