Study On The Settlement Of Sand And Coastline Changes In Chongming

The southern part of Qidong city of today had been once called Chongming Waisha before the foundation of Qidong County. However this area was still covered by sea water in early Qing Dynasty. Later, the sand deposition made many sandy islets of various sizes in this area, and these islets had been growing in size and number all through the mid-Qing Dynasty. Finally in the early 20^thC, they overlapped each other and joined the northern coast of Haimen County.The earliest villages and little towns appeared in Waisha area as the result of the exploitation of agricultural lands, so the chronology of the emergence of new islands in Waisha could have probably dictated the chronology of the appearance of local habitants. Therefore with the aid of the software Geography Information System, this thesis attempts to compile the documents concerning the space-time evolution of early Waisha habitants to construct the chronological geographic maps of Waishai so as to retrace its naissance from sandy islets. By doing so this thesis tries to reveal the impact that natural power and human activities could have imposed to the geographic evolution of Waisha.