Railway construction and industrialization played an important role in reshaping the urban morphology of inland resource-based cities in Republican-period China. Taking Taiyuan during 1912–1937 as a case study, this paper examines the spatial association between railway corridors and industrial locations and discusses how this relationship contributed to the reorganization of urban space. Historical maps, railway maps, local gazetteers, archival materials, and existing literature were integrated into a historical GIS database. Kernel density estimation, railway buffer analysis, mean-center analysis, and standard deviational ellipse analysis were used to reconstruct the staged evolution of industrial nodes and railway corridors. The results show that Taiyuan’s industrial space evolved from a scattered point-based pattern to a railway-oriented axial-belt layout and then to a polycentric industrial corridor. Industrial nodes gradually moved closer to railway lines, while the mean center of industrial distribution shifted from the traditional city toward railway-related industrial districts. The findings suggest that Taiyuan followed one possible railway–resource–industry pathway shaped by railway construction, resource endowments, provincial industrial policies, land conditions, and the inherited urban fabric. This study provides historical spatial evidence for identifying railway–industrial heritage corridors and understanding inland industrial urban form.

Traditional villages in river basins preserve rural landscapes through both environmental adaptation and accumulated heritage governance. Taking 173 national-level traditional villages in the Fenhe River Basin as the study objects, this study examines their spatial patterns and the heterogeneity of influencing factors using kernel density estimation, nearest-neighbor analysis, spatial autocorrelation, optimal-parameters-based geographical detector, and multiscale geographically weighted regression. The villages display a significant clustered distribution rather than a random or administratively bounded pattern, forming a belt-like structure along the Fenhe River, its major tributaries, and mountain-basin transition zones, with high-density cores in the Taiyuan and Linfen basins. Among all examined factors, the enrichment of cultural relic protection units shows the strongest explanatory power in the OPGD results, with a q-value of 0.4349. Its MGWR coefficients are also predominantly positive and significant, suggesting that officially recognized heritage resources act as spatial anchors for the persistence and organization of traditional villages. Precipitation, elevation, intangible cultural heritage, per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and historical post-road accessibility further shape village density, but their effects are spatially uneven. These findings suggest that conservation in the Fenhe River Basin should move beyond isolated village repair toward a watershed-scale linear heritage network linking river corridors, historical routes, cultural relic protection units, and cross-county governance.

Traditional villages preserve regional cultural memory and distinctive rural landscapes while embodying the historical evolution of human–land relationships. This study examines the spatial distribution and influencing factors of 221 nationally listed traditional villages in central Shanxi using GIS-based spatial analysis, standard deviational ellipse analysis, river and road buffer analyses, and the optimal parameters-based geographical detector (OPGD). The villages are significantly clustered in a multi-core, locally contiguous pattern oriented along a northeast–southwest axis. Most are located at elevations of 500–1000 m. Village frequencies vary nonlinearly with distance from rivers and roads, suggesting trade-offs among water access, hazard avoidance, and transport connectivity. Temperature, population density, GDP, and elevation show relatively strong explanatory power, while the interaction between urbanization rate and population density has the highest explanatory power. By linking historical formation conditions with contemporary development pressures, this study proposes a cultural landscape network organized around high-density village clusters, water-system and historical transport corridors, and major mountain–basin landscape units, supported by differentiated conservation zoning and context-specific rural spatial governance. These findings provide region-specific evidence for living heritage conservation and sustainable rural governance.

Chinese local gazetteer maps contain visual evidence of historical cities and architecture, but their hand-drawn, low-texture, and small-sample characteristics make automatic recognition difficult. This study develops a transfer-learning workflow to classify gazetteer-derived architectural images and examines its usefulness for digital heritage image organization, indexing, and retrieval. A dataset of 685 images covering nine classification labels was constructed from Chinese local gazetteer maps. Five representative models, ResNet-18, MobileNetV3-Small, EfficientNet-B0, DenseNet-121, and ViT-B/16, were trained and compared under the same transfer-learning setting. Their performance was evaluated using accuracy, macro-average F1 score, class-level metrics, confusion matrices, difficult-sample analysis, and Grad-CAM visualization. CNN-based models outperformed the Vision Transformer on this task. EfficientNet-B0 achieved the best results, with a test accuracy of 87.38% and a macro-average F1 score of 86.60%; after disabling class weights, the macro-average F1 score increased to 86.81%. Misclassifications mainly occurred in visually similar or context-dependent category pairs, including gate tower and drum tower, bell tower and drum tower, and buildings inside and outside the city. The results show that compact CNNs can support classification, indexing, and retrieval of hand-drawn architectural images in gazetteer archives, although the workflow should be regarded as an auxiliary tool rather than direct evidence for specific extant buildings.

To investigate the correlation between construction dimensions and seismic performance of Song-dynasty official and local timber structures, two scaled models were subjected to horizontal cyclic quasi-static loading tests. One model is the Goddess Mother Hall of Jinci, and the other is the 7th-grade timber frame described in Yingzao Fashi. The models have similar vertical-layer proportions but differ in bay width, E-fang cross-sectional dimensions, Dou-gong cai-height, and column-top tenon cross-sections. The relative ratio method was used to mitigate the effects of material and scale differences and to focus on the relative contributions of the column-frame and Dou-gong layers to the overall frame. For the Goddess Mother Hall model, which is characterized by a wide bay and thin E-fang, the ratio of the equivalent viscous damping coefficient of the column-frame layer to that of the overall frame remains above 1.0, indicating greater energy dissipation efficiency than the overall structure. However, its stiffness degradation is more pronounced under high vertical loads. The enlarged column-top tenon cross-section and slightly reduced cai height produce a stable increase in the stiffness contribution of the Dou-gong layer, whereas its relative contribution to energy dissipation proportion is smaller than that in the Yingzao Fashi model. The results show that dimensional differences are associated with distinct trends in the stiffness and energy dissipation of the column-frame and Dou-gong layers and that these trends vary with vertical load. This study reveals the coupling relationship between dimensional adjustments and structural performance in official norms and local construction practices, providing a basis and directions for further research on the mechanical effects of dimensional variations in ancient timber structures.

Historic urban areas in inland resource-based cities are often reshaped by overlapping changes in roads, public services, industry, housing, and everyday land use. However, these changes are not always clearly connected to differentiated conservation and renewal decisions. Taking the Taiyuan historical urban area as a case, this study aims to clarify how multi-period historical spatial evidence can be used to interpret morphological evolution, road accessibility, land-use transformation, and their conservation-renewal implications. Standard deviational ellipse analysis, kernel density estimation, and space syntax were used to separately examine urban form, land-use concentration, and road-network accessibility. Taiyuan changed from a compact walled city into a complex urban structure involving internal infill, local extension, and functional reorganization. The historical core retained its importance for commercial services, public administration, and highly accessible streets. New clusters appeared near peripheral transport nodes and residential expansion areas. The road network became more regular and better connected. Land use shifted from residential-administrative embeddedness to a differentiated pattern. Based on the three lines of evidence, four conservation-renewal zones are identified: key conservation, fabric repair, adaptive reuse, and coordinated renewal. Beyond the Taiyuan case, the study provides a case-based approach for linking historical map translation, HGIS analysis, and conservation-renewal zoning in inland historic urban areas.