The author?s interest in Chinese urban planning started forty years ago in the Institute of Urbanism in Berlin under the direction of Hans Scharoun. Twenty years later he went to work as an UN planning adviser in several countries in Asia. In this occupation he spent about twelve years. In the succeeding period he travelled widely through all countries of East Asia, visiting almost all places within the traditional distribution area of the Chinese emigrants in the Pacific Region outside Mainland China guided by his professional interest. In the last decade he had the opportunity to travel through all the provinces of Inner China and to visit various places in Outer China thereby collecting maps, statistics, photo- graphs and other source material, and having discussions on Chinese urban development problems with the city planners in the respective cities. He was supported in these activities by his colleagues of the Tongji University Shanghai. In recent years, the flow of information about Chinese cities has substantially increased. Several urban studies relating mainly to the larger Chinese cities were published by Western geographers and were of great help for this book. However, a book of this scope and con- cept has not been published in any language before. Studies of Chinese urbanism face the dilemma of an enormous number of urban settlements and the long history of many of these places. They changed with time in size, form, function, location and even had different names in succeeding periods. The book contains beside graphs, photographs, and tables a considerable amount of maps, designed and drawn especially for this volume. They are presented in one graphic style to make them comparable with each other and have only two scales: 1:50 000, showing the old walled cities, and 1: 100000, for the cities of today. A fine coloured map "China 1987", showing cities with more than 400000 urban inhabitants, based on the Generalized Land Use Map of China (including Hong Kong and Taiwan) by Wu Chuan Yun et al. and on the Census of 1982, prepared by A. Schinz, is included. The book is thought to help foreigners as well as Chinese to understand the urban development process within the general frame of its geographical and historical background and in comparison to world urbanism. It will be of interest to geographers as well as urban planners and to the generally in China interested reader who wants to understand the Chinese development process not just only on a day to day basis. Of interest to: geographers, especially in the field of population and settlement geography, agricultural and economic geography, transportation geography and historical geography; ethnographers, linguists, travel and transportation specialists, politicians, specialists in economic policy, cartographers, historians and their institutions, scientific libraries.