Fan I Chun was here at Stanford yesterday, visiting from Academica Sinica where he’s busy developing GIS datasets for China based on aerial photos, historical maps, gazetteers and atlases.  Stanford has had authorized access to the Chinese Civilization in Time and Space (CCTS) GIS since October 2009 and Academic Sinica is steadily developing on-line and plug-in assets to give more freedom to work with their GIS data.  CCTS data was instrumental in georectification of historic administrative units in my development of the Digital Gazetteer of the Song Dynasty and is a valuable resource for any spatial historian who wants to study East Asia.