How city area is measured in China

What "city" means in China

Beijing and Chongqing are direct-administered municipalities (直辖市). Chongqing's statistical yearbook says it became the fourth municipality directly under the Central Government in 1997, after Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai. The same yearbook, in its explanatory notes, says the country is divided into provinces, autonomous regions and municipalities directly under the Central Government, and that such municipalities are divided into districts (区) and counties (县). The official area figure for a municipality covers all of them.

Chongqing shows how wide that territory can be. Its yearbook counts 26 districts and 12 counties in 2024, and gives the whole municipality as 82,400 km²^1,2. Official documents also give Chongqing much smaller areas. The 2007–2020 urban-rural master plan, approved by the State Council in 2011, defines an urban planning area (城市规划区) of 5,473 km²^3,4, inside which urban and rural planning is managed together. By our calculation, the municipality is about 15 times the size of that planning area.

Beijing works the same way. The municipality covers 16,411 km²^5,6. Dongcheng and Xicheng, its two core districts, are a small fraction of that. The Beijing government describes Dongcheng as one of the "core functional areas of Beijing", and Beijing's 2013 statistical yearbook grouped the two districts as the "Core Districts of Capital Function". By our calculation, the two together make up less than one percent of the municipality.

This page covers only Beijing and Chongqing.

Why our map may show a different number

When we have no stored boundary for a city, the app sends OpenStreetMap's Nominatim service a search for the city name and country, restricted to cities. On 17 October 2026, "Chongqing, China" returned OpenStreetMap relation 913069, displayed as "重庆市, 中国". It is an administrative boundary for the whole municipality, not the urban planning area, and Nominatim gave its address type as "state". When the result is a relation with its own polygon, the app draws that polygon directly and does not mark it approximate. The area we measured from it on 17 October 2026 is within one percent of the yearbook's 82,400 km²^1,2.

The same search for "Beijing, China" returned relation 912940, displayed as "北京市, 中国", with address type "city". It too is the boundary of the whole municipality, and as a relation with its own polygon it would likewise be drawn directly, not marked approximate. The area we measured from it on 17 October 2026 is within one percent of the official 16,411 km²^5,6.

So on that date, both searches returned a province-level territory, many times larger than the core districts or the planning area, and an area measured from either result describes the whole municipality.

Problems getting boundaries in China

The first problem is that the narrower definitions are hard to draw. We found no OpenStreetMap boundary for Chongqing's urban planning area, so it appears in the tables but not on the map. The State Council text gives its area but no outline that we could use.

The second problem is that district boundaries can be faulty. OpenStreetMap's relation for Dongcheng (relation 288600) is within one percent of the official 41.8 km²^7,8, so we draw it. Its relation for Xicheng (relation 568660) is not usable: when we fetched it from Nominatim on 17 October 2026, the polygon reached far outside central Beijing, and the area we measured from it was about three times the official 50.7 km²^9,10. We found no source that explains this, so we do not draw Xicheng.

The third problem is that small-area figures vary between publishers. The Beijing government's Dongcheng page states one value in its text and a slightly different one in its page metadata, and Beijing's 2013 statistical yearbook listed other land areas for both districts. We could not archive the yearbook table, so it is not cited here. None of the district figures on this page carries a reference date. Chongqing's municipal area also varies by publisher: China Daily states a figure that differs slightly from the yearbook's, which we show as a corroborating value.