it’s no secret that i’m a google earth whore. their streetview feature which i stumbled upon last summer while in columbus only deepened my love of the service. i noticed they now cover parts of france, spain and italy as well as japan. the only thing missing seems to be china.

fortunately, thanks to a tip from @lparsons (who does in fact have a real name outside of twitter), i’ve been directed to city8.com. it’s basically google streetview for chinese cities. no nanjing yet, let alone my poor little jiangnan villages, but that doesn’t mean i can’t (and did) kill half an hour putzing around beijing (http://bj.city8.com/) or shanghai (http://sh.city8.com/). the above image was captured in an alley of the northern capital.

currently there are 24 cities in which you can explore including chengdu, jinan, dalian and guangzhou. it’s by no means of the scale of google’s project but for now it’ll have to do. rumour has it that taipei and hong kong will be added to google earth by this summer. i can imagine they may face some hurdles to get to the mainland with all those mobile cameras.