Tianshan Range ) were lettered. For the sake of 
sticking out letterings in the photomap, we taken 
on a way which made chinese characters with 
shadows of white rim. At present, the software with 
shadow chinese characters has not yet been 
manufactured, we taken on map-making way which 
color and white characters were overlapped and 
staggered each other. AS respects of legend design, 
photomap is different from general-purpose map in 
content, because it is provided with dominant 
position of plantiful geographic information. The 
legend illustrates and interprets fully contents 
of photomap to readers. The legend was divided into 
three sections; The first section consisted of 
hydro-elements such as rivers, lakes, reservoirs, 
islands, coral reefs and so on. The second section 
consisted of physical elements such as deserts, 
loess landform, coniferous forest, marshes and so 
on. The third section consisted of social and 
economic elements such as cities, railways,  inter- 
national boundaries, Great Wall and so on. To 
distinguish snow from cloud in the photomap, a 
legend of cloud layers was added to prevent readers 
from misunderstanding. It is emphasised that the 
first and the third sections could be seen in a 
general map and the second section is only on the 
photomap. t is very useful to the high level 
readers. In order to differ from the legend in 
conventional maps, all contents of the legend were 
represented as a scheme of legend with 
"enviromantal mode", or a window of the images to 
reveal the main part ( to contain its geographic 
background ) that had been illustrated in the 
legend. Thus, readers can understand and read the 
legend in the organic way not a isolated way. By 
contrasting legend, it is easy to understand main 
part of the map in depth for readers. Particulariy, 
by reading the groud elements, readers could relate 
enviroment to law of geographic distribution and 
make it have high value reading. It is necessary to 
discuss map layout. The photomap is on the scale of 
1:4,000,000. The full margin size is 150 by 100 
centimetres, which needed to use two standard-sized 
Sheets to print, and regard 110 E as the central 
meridian line. According to the Size, the northern 
most Mohe Town and the southern most Hainan Island 
lay basically in the edges of the sheet margin. In 
Comparison to above montioned, there were some 
distances from the eastern most and the western 
most international boundaries of China to the sheet 
margins. Thus it is passable to make use of the 
blank of East China Sea and the Pacific for 
arranging the illustration of South China Sea. In 
the photomap, the beautiful South China Sea image 
is seldom seen in other maps. The coral reefs, 
scattered the ocean like stars in the sky, were 
likely to inlay beautiful sapphires in the dark 
blue ocean, exquisitely carved. And so its scale 
was increased to 1:7,000,000. The whole South China 
Sea was laid in the lower right and the legend 
corresponded with South China Sea was laid in lower 
left, that made use of the area of the map out of 
China. They distributed symmetrically in right and 
left of the whole map and played an important role 
in balancing and steading the photomap. Owing to 
limitation of collection of satellite images, there 
were not sufficient images out of China. For the 
cake of uniting and sticking out main area, a part 
out of China was processed as grey. The ocean was 
a dark blue color and formed a sharp contrast with 
the land. Saturation was harmonized each other and 
it played a very harmonious role in the colorful 
main area. 
CONCLUS | ON 
A high quality, low cost and rapid mapping method 
of photomap has been developed for the macroscopic 
384 
and smal! scale mapping using the full resolution 
AVHRR data. Digital image processing technique 
ensurse the high quality and the map accuracy. This 
is the firs integral photomap of China with the 
digital image processing and also the first 
standard national photomap in China. Mapping of the 
small scale photomap is a potential aspect in NOAA 
AVHRR application. This photomap is very useful not 
only in the remote sensing or geoscience 
applications but aiso in many other fields such as 
education, planning, popular science and art 
appreciation. A better improved photomap, the 
second edition, in which the area outside China 
will be filled with image is going to be done.