Lights of China

China by night

Name: China by night attractions dataset
Creator: InfoGap
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

40,549 city-light points from our own dataset, laid over the province boundaries we host ourselves. No map service, no tiles, no third-party requests. Drag to pan, scroll or use + / − to zoom in on a city.

By day → One pre-rendered image; past a third of the country the points are drawn live.

City light (one of 40,549) Province boundary Beijing — tap to open the attractions list

JavaScript is off, so the map itself cannot be drawn. The night raster is still here as a plain file: lights.png, and you can still open the Beijing attractions or the Badaling lesson.

40,549light points in the dataset

34province-level regions

1image request for the lights

0third-party calls

Same map, daylight The China atlas → Every province we hold boundaries for, with the day/night switch on the same map. Next step Beijing → 201 attractions from our own Beijing dataset, each with a Chinese and an English name.

How the 40,549 points are drawn. They are pre-composited at build time into a single 2,200 × 2,031 image (lights.png, 465 KB), so the browser paints one node instead of 40,549 — that is what keeps a phone smooth. Zoom past a third of the country and the page adds a second layer it draws itself: lights.bin, the same points quantised to 5 bytes each (198 KB, fetched only when you zoom), painted on a <canvas> and culled to what is actually on screen. That is why the lights stay sharp when you go in close instead of turning into a blur. The provinces are the same boundary file the day atlas uses; nothing on this page talks to a map service.

Data & methods

Source. Compiled by InfoGap from its own place database.

What this data is. Each record is one place in InfoGap’s own place database.

Last updated: 2026-09-17

Source: InfoGap · License: CC BY 4.0 (attribution required, link back to this page). Data hub: our data hub · registry.json