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This study presents the methodology and results of a core-periphery GIS model of the historical growth and spread of Islam in China based on a dataset of 1,774 mosques. These sites were organized into data subsets according to their founding dates during five major dynastic periods in Chinese history: Tang/Song, Yuan, Ming, Qing, and Republican. Core areas were identified and mapped based on where mosques clustered during each period. North China was the paramount core region in all periods. Not until the late Qing and Republican periods did the Northwest and Yunnan compare with North China, while coastal China never developed into a core area. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article, the authors present a spatiotemporal model for elucidating the evolution of market towns spanning from before 1550 to 1980. The study area, Jiangnan (i.e., current Shanghai and Suzhou cities area), with its flat elevation and compact river network, is the best place to evaluate the dynamic hierarchical change of the market towns in China. The population and the geographical location of each market town are manually extracted from a large quantity of historical literature. A geographical information system, spatial statistics, and the Shannon entropy are utilized for capturing the growth or decline of market towns and examining the spatial and hierarchical relationships of the market towns. The proposed methods can be easily extended to other historical research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]