the nine nations of china

A fascinating interactive map by Patrick Chovanec at the Atlantic Monthly splits China into nine distinct sub-regions; while there are, as Chovanec explains on his blog, any number of other ways to split China, none of those have really penetrated deeply into Western consciousness, in my experience (I've always been vaguely aware that China was a really, really large nation with geographically and culturally distinct sub-regions, but I've never had any kind of understanding of what those sub-regions might be).

[via James Fallows]