Trade Routes Under The Settlement Of Towns In The Hanjiang Corridor In The South Of Shaanxi

Hanjiang River Corridor in Southern Shaanxi, which lies to the upriver of Hanjiang River, has communicated between the north-west part of china and the south part. As a result of the communication, there have been many transport lines. Among these lines, two Trade Routes—Hanjiang Waterway and Sichuan-Shaanxi Land Way are most typical. On the Trade Routes, there were numerous market towns and settlements. This paper attempts to analyze market towns and settlements Trade Routes, rather than isolated research settlements itself, and explore the changes and explore the transition, depending on information about Trade Routes but not themselves.First of all, this paper has described the background of the subject, purpose and significance of the study, the relevant definition of the concept and the research framework. Then, two aspects of the background have been investigated, namely analysis on regional overview of Hanjiang River Corridor in Southern Shaanxi with the two Trade Routes. It is on this specific geographic background the two Trade Routes has emerged. What’s more, the traffic type of market towns and settlements has been produced by such specific geographic background combined with the Trade Routes.Subsequently, starting at the case studies about market towns and settlements—four typical case studies on the two Trade Routes—as well as ShuHe Town and FengHuang Town on Hanjiang Waterway, these cases have researched from these Scales:relatively static regional scale, settlement scale, street-scale, building scale, and dynamic time scales.Then, I have stated the form and transformation of the towns and settlements after summarized analysis from the external and internal factors. I attempt to explore the promoting factor on the development and the future of the towns.Above all, based on the whole research, I have given out some flourish vision of the market towns and settlements.