The Russian Archives keep a great amount of maps and corresponding papers of military agents and travelers for the Western China, especially for the second half of the XIX century. Great interest of the Russian cartographers to this vast region is explained by state political ambitions, economic interest to develop profitable trade, scientific interest.

Our aim is to build the publicly available catalog of these sources and create georeferenced dataset of the historical place names features extracted from large- and medium-scale maps. Usage of the common standards for metadata creation (CSDGM, FGDC-STD-001-1998), the ADL Feature Type Thesaurus, approaches developed by the China Historical GIS ensure compatibility of our datasets with already created products.

By today the short list of sources from only Moscow archives presents about sixty Russian maps. Among them original maps of the expeditions of N.M. Przhevalskii, P.K. Kozlov, K.I. Bogdanovich, M.V. Pevtsov, V.I. Roborovskii, various military surveys. There are route surveys with the detailed descriptions, instrumental topographic surveys of large areas showing populated places, historical sites, physiographic features.

The sample georeferenced dataset presents place names for the section of the Southern Tibet (beginning of XX century), compiled on materials of the Russian and British geographical societies. Being built in ArcView environment it was verified according to the DCW base map and includes Russian and Romanized Name equivalents. Together with other datasets and photos of the most interesting sources this will be the multilingual contribution to the CHGIS. We plan to publish materials on the Web for free academic use.