Being on a map is one of those pieces of groundwork nobody assigns, because in Europe it happens almost by itself: a business appears on the map everyone uses within a short time of existing, and the owner's only job is to claim it. In China neither half of that is true. The map everyone uses is not the one your team uses, your address is not on it until someone files it, and the coordinates you would naturally hand over are in the wrong system — which puts your marker somewhere you did not intend, politely and without any error message.
Two maps, and not the one you use
Mapping in China sits behind a licensing regime: publishing map data and operating a navigation service require a surveying and mapping qualification granted domestically, which is the reason the mapping services a European team reaches for are either absent from mainland devices or present without the data that would make them useful. What people actually use divides between two large providers — Amap (高德) and Baidu Maps (百度地图) — with the first widely embedded in other applications, including ones you would not think of as mapping products. Treat the pair of them as the practical universe, confirm the current situation rather than trusting a list, and understand that a presence on one is not a presence on the other.
That last point is the one that costs time. Each provider keeps its own database of places, each has its own route for submitting one, and nothing propagates between them. A company that filed its address once and saw it appear concludes the job is done, and finds out from a visitor using the other map that it is half done. Both, or neither, is the only sensible policy.
Filing a point of interest
A place on a map is a record with an owner, and getting one created is an administrative act rather than a technical one. Each provider has a route for a business to submit or claim a location, the evidence asked for resembles what any verification asks for — a registered identity and something that ties it to the address — and the detail varies between providers and changes, so check the current procedure rather than following a recipe. What does not change is the order of the work.
- Settle the address in Chinese first, in the form the post and the municipality use, down to the building and the unit. A transliterated European-style address is not an address here, and it is the reason many submissions come back.
- Search both maps for the address before filing anything. A record may already exist, created by a previous occupant, a delivery driver or the building management, and claiming it is quicker than creating a duplicate — which is in any case likely to be refused.
- Decide the name that will appear, in Chinese, and use exactly the same string on every surface you control. A visitor who searches the name on your website has to find the same name on the map, and a company whose map record, official account and signage disagree is a company that is hard to confirm.
- Place the marker yourself, on the map, at the entrance people actually use rather than at the centre of the building. In a compound or an industrial park this is the difference between a visitor arriving and a visitor calling you from a gate.
- Check the result from a phone, on both maps, by searching the name and by asking for a route from a station — and check it again after any move, renaming or change of signage, because a record that was right once goes quietly wrong.
One detail deserves naming because it is invisible until it costs you a visit: in a large compound, an industrial park or a mall, the useful record is not the building, it is the way in. The marker belongs where a driver stops and a visitor walks in, and the record should say which gate, which floor and which unit in the text a visitor reads, not only in the coordinates a routing engine uses.
The coordinate shift that drops the marker next door
Here is the part that catches engineering teams. The latitude and longitude a phone's satellite receiver produces, and the ones in every international dataset, are expressed in the global reference system. Maps published in mainland China use a different, deliberately offset national system, and one of the large providers applies a further transformation of its own on top of that. The offset is not a rounding error and it is not constant: it varies with where you are, and in a city it is enough to move a point across a road or to the wrong side of a junction. Nothing fails while this happens. The coordinates are valid, the map draws them, and the marker sits confidently in the wrong place.
The rule that keeps a team out of trouble is to decide, once, in which system coordinates are stored, and to convert only at the edges. Store the global-system values that come from a receiver or from an international source, convert when handing a point to a Chinese map, and convert back when receiving a point from one. The failure that is hard to repair is the opposite: a database in which some rows were converted and some were not, with nothing recording which. Every provider documents the conversion its own interfaces expect; the discipline is to read that documentation before the first point is stored rather than after a hundred of them are wrong.
What this means for a site with a map on it
A contact page with an embedded map is the most ordinary thing on a corporate website and one of the most reliable ways to break a page for a Chinese visitor. The embed is a request to a foreign service that may be slow or may never complete, and a page that waits for it shows an empty rectangle or a loading state that never resolves. The visitor concludes something about the company, and it is not about mapping.
- Serve a different map to Chinese visitors. The page your international audience sees and the page served to a visitor in China should not be running the same embed. Whichever way you split them, make the Chinese version's map a local one.
- Never let a map block the page. Load it after the content, inside a container with a fixed size, and show the address and the route in text underneath. A page that renders fully with the map still loading has lost nothing.
- Write the address as text, in Chinese, selectable. The most useful thing on the page is a string a visitor can copy and paste into their own map application. An address inside an image cannot be copied, and an address only in a map widget disappears with it.
- Give directions in words as well. The nearest metro station and the exit number, which gate to use, what the building is called locally, what is on the ground floor. Visitors navigate by landmarks at the end of the journey, not by coordinates.
- Test the whole path from a phone in China. Search the name, open the page, tap the address, get a route. Each step can fail on its own, and the only way to know is to do it on the network your visitors are on.
An address nobody can find costs visits
The cost of this is invisible, which is why it stays unfixed. Nobody writes to say they could not find you; they arrive late and say nothing, or they do not arrive and the meeting is rescheduled for a reason that sounds like a diary problem. A showroom is worse still, because the whole point of it is that people come without an appointment, and a place that cannot be found on the map people use receives exactly the visitors who were already determined to come. There is a second, quieter effect: a verifiable address is one of the things a cautious Chinese buyer checks before replying to a foreign company, alongside the official account and the registered name. A company that is nowhere on the map reads as a company that is nowhere, and the correction costs an afternoon of filing and a conversion function.
Do the test before anything else: hand your Chinese address to someone on a phone in China and ask them to reach your door without calling you. Watch where they stop. That walk tells you which of the three problems you have — no record, a record on only one map, or a marker in the wrong place — and it costs one short errand.