The M-BAM Main Thread
- Thread starter Pogoboy20
- Start date
I personally don't really like this since a lot (if not most) of the white areas actually do have significant numbers of inhabitants, who do actually speak languages.
For example this completely blank area is Ejine Banner, which has a population of over 35 thousand. The area of the whole banner is about 115 thousand sq km, so if they were evenly spread out over the area they would indeed be under 1 pop/sq km. However, most of the people in this region are actually concentrated in the central river valley, so that area should probably be coloured in with the Mandarin language.
Looking at the rest of Inner Mongolia, I notice that this map perpetuates a common misconception that most of that region is majority Mongol. This might have been true 150 years ago, but in fact 4/5 of the population are Han. Although it is true that the regions depicted as Mongol in this map are predominantly in the Gobi Desert and therefore low in population density, we can observe that specifically Xilingol League and Alasha League are both shown as majority Mongol across the whole extent shown as densely populated, whereas indicated by census data both are majority Han.
Yea the white area does not show uninhabited land, rather it shows sparsely populated land, alot of ppl on the reddit post got upset to because they misunderstood this.
Also the fully coloured areas show a 70% majority or higher while mixed areas are anywhere between 30-70%.
While languages that don't reach a 30% areal majority anywhere aren't shown at all, this is a major shortcoming in the map yes but without this limitiation it would have honestly turned into a never ending rabbithole project for us.
Be very cautious with Chinese statistics on ethnicity in these areas. Some believe that the Chinese overestimate their ethnic and population statistics, similar to how they inflate economic statistics to meet quota goals. In addition, these statistics do not factor in mixed-ethnicity individuals, since the ethnic status of an individual depends on his or her mother or father and individuals can only choose 1 ethnicity on the census. Obviously though, it is the only resource on such a large scale, so it has quite a lot of reliability
Yea I get that, I won't claim this map to be perfect, theres probably a large number of mistakes, and lack of a proper river map for example made placements difficult in several areas, still though, we did the best we could do with the resources we could find I think, if anyone wants to make changes or improvements to the map by all means, that was my goal by sharing it here
I just don't see what the point of most of that white is, since most of the white areas are actually inhabited, and it is possible to make meaningful statements about which languages are spoken there.
I guess I can do so, but I think it'll be uncomfortable to work with it. I think much better to paint it one color and sign "small states". But I can try to do tho
Nice job! A few areas are missing, but you're doing a good job so far. Good luck. Maybe you'll make a full m-bam one day
So, a common mistake in 1914's Ottoman Empire is Najran: it was its own independent state under the Banu Yam, in southern Arabia, but it is always shown as Ottoman territory. Otherwise, nice map!