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Can you place all 229 cities, counties and districts of South Korea?
Can you locate all 47 prefectures of Japan?
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Can you place all 197 districts of Cambodia?
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Mainland China is administered in 31 divisions at province level, and every Chinese number plate starts by naming one of them. The first character on the plate is the division's own one character abbreviation, and it is on the front of every car, van and lorry on the road, so a single passing vehicle narrows a photograph from a country of nine and a half million square kilometres to one province. That only helps if you know where the province is. This page is the whole set, region by region, and the game asks you to put each name on the map.
Three kinds of division sit side by side on this map, all at the same level of government. Most are provinces, 省 (shěng). Five are autonomous regions, 自治区 (zìzhìqū), each named for a minority nationality: Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia and Guangxi. Four are municipalities, 直辖市 (zhíxiáshì), cities reporting straight to the central government rather than to a province around them. The three kinds differ in what they are called and in some of how they are run, and in nothing you can see from the road. Hong Kong and Macau are a fourth kind again, special administrative regions, and are not in this game.
The abbreviations are the reason this set repays learning even if you never touch an administrative map again. Some are simply the first character of the name: 京 for Beijing, 云 for Yunnan, 新 for Xinjiang, 藏 for Tibet, 黑 for Heilongjiang. Many are not, because they are the name of the ancient state that once occupied the ground: 鲁 for Shandong, from Lu, the state Confucius was born in. 豫 for Henan. 冀 for Hebei. 晋 for Shanxi, from Jin. 粤 for Guangdong and 沪 for Shanghai, neither of which appears in the modern name at all. After the character comes a Latin letter for the city within the province, A usually being the capital, so 粤A is Guangzhou and 京A is Beijing itself.
The names are the other half of it, and they are unusually literal. Chinese province names are mostly directions attached to a landmark, and once you know the landmark the pair sorts itself:
So 北 is north, 南 south, 东 east and 西 west, and five of the harder pairs on this map are one character apart. The game will show either form: switch on the local name in the start dialog and Sichuan becomes 四川省, Beijing becomes 北京市 and Tibet becomes 西藏自治区. If you are learning the names in order to read them off a sign, the Chinese setting is the one to practise in.
One name is spelled oddly on purpose. Shaanxi and Shanxi are different provinces whose names are both Shanxi in ordinary pinyin, separated only by tone, so the convention is to double the a on 陕西 and leave 山西 alone. Shaanxi is the western one with Xi'an in it; Shanxi is the eastern one against Hebei.
The pairs that catch people out are the ones that sound alike rather than the ones that sit close. Hubei and Hebei are both "north of" something, and the something is a lake in one case and a river in the other. Hunan and Henan are the same trap upside down. Shanxi and Shaanxi are a spelling apart. Qinghai and Hainan share the 海 that means sea and are two thousand kilometres apart. Jilin, Jiangxi and Jiangsu begin alike and sit in the northeast, the southeast and the east respectively.
The other thing worth knowing is that the map is heavily lopsided. The eastern third holds most of the divisions and nearly all of the small ones, and the western two thirds hold five. A guess in the wrong half of the country is rarely the mistake; a guess one province along the coast is.
Those are the six regions the country is conventionally divided into: 华北, 华东, 中南, 东北, 西南 and 西北. They carry no administrative power today, which is worth saying out loud because they look like a tier of government. They were one, briefly, as the greater administrative areas of the early 1950s, and they survive in the names of railway bureaus, in weather bulletins, in sports leagues and in the way the country is taught. Each region can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog, which makes the Northeast a three question drill and East China a proper sitting.
Three of the four municipalities are on the coast and this one is nowhere near it. It was the eastern end of Sichuan until 1997, when it was split off to run the resettlement of the Three Gorges Dam, which makes it the newest province-level division on the map. Find Sichuan, look at its southeastern corner, and the bite taken out of it is this.
The one whose spelling exists to keep it apart from a neighbour. It is the tall province in the middle of the country, with Xi'an and the terracotta army at its southern end and the loess plateau over the rest of it. Its plate character is 陕, and if you see one and cannot remember which Shanxi it is: the doubled a is the western one.
An island province in the far south, tropical, and the only division on this map you cannot get wrong by clicking a neighbour. It is also young: it was the southern end of Guangdong until 1988. Anything in a photograph that looks like the Caribbean and carries Chinese writing is here, and the plate says 琼.
22 provinces on the mainland, which together with 5 autonomous regions and 4 municipalities makes 31 divisions at province level, and that is what this game covers. The People's Republic counts 23 provinces, the twenty-third being Taiwan, which it does not administer. Hong Kong and Macau are special administrative regions rather than provinces and are not in the game either.
The first character is the province, autonomous region or municipality the vehicle is registered in, written with that division's own one character abbreviation. The Latin letter after it is the city or prefecture inside it, with A usually the provincial capital. So a plate reading 粤A is Guangzhou in Guangdong and 京A is Beijing. Every plate carries it, which makes it the fastest way to place a Chinese photograph.
They sit at the same level of government and differ in what they are for. A province is the ordinary case. An autonomous region is named for a minority nationality and has some nominal powers over language and culture: Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, Ningxia and Guangxi. A municipality is a city governed directly by the central government instead of by a province: Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Chongqing.
They are two different provinces whose names are both written Shanxi in ordinary pinyin and are told apart only by tone. The convention is to double the a on the western one, so Shaanxi is the province containing Xi'an and Shanxi is the province east of it, between the Yellow River and Hebei.
North China, Northeast China, East China, South Central China, Southwest China and Northwest China. They are how Chinese geography is taught and how a weather bulletin is read out, and they were a real tier of government for a few years in the early 1950s, but they are not one now: the province is the top administrative unit and the regions sit above it only in description.
Yes, though China reaches GeoGuessr mostly through user photo spheres rather than official Street View coverage. Where it does appear, the plate on any vehicle names the province outright, road signs and expressway shields name it too, and the phone area code and the postcode both narrow to it. Every one of those is a lookup unless you know where the name goes, which is what this trainer drills.
More Asian administrative maps to learn: Japan Prefectures, India States, Vietnam Provinces and Thailand Provinces. For the neighbours to the north and west, try Russia Federal Subjects and Turkey Provinces.
