English? You mean Pinyin? Most streets if not all have no English name.

Sorry, yes I mean Pinyin. In the few cities (not small towns or backroads) that I have been on the Pinyin is also displayed. This probably isn't universal, but might match where tourists might be without a guide.

Thanks

Dr. PITUK

English v pinyin when it comes to maps is a bit of a hair splitting exercise IMO:
-many, if not most, streets are named after cities (in which Pinyin=English)
-some maps translate lu as road, jie as street, Qiao as bridge, etc, but these words are simple enough to figure out
-directional words? I suppose it is generally useful when these are translated. The drawback is that non-Chinese speakers have a decent shot of being understood when spouting off "Nanjing Xi Lu" v considerably less if they say "West Nanjing Road".

Just to entertain you, here is the English translation of the Beijing subway stations: http://www.thebeijinger.com/blog/201...beijing-subway
There is indeed a section of Shanghai where most streets are names after a city or province but most streets have their own historic names and "men' is not translated to gate. Streets names are street names, it's the name of places that can be translated or not such as Temple of Heaven vs Tiantan. A map in Pinyin is fine for a non-mandarin speaking tourist. And Pinyin is preferable English when showing the name to a taxi driver or asking directions. Nearly all will have no clue what the Temple of Heaven is. Not all will figure out the Pinyin though.

Have you tried maps.me? One downloads maps in advance, and tracks your location via the phone GPS without using wifi or local phone service. Not that great for China, but amazing for some places. Probably OK for locating you on streets in China, but not many restaurants and hotels are on the map. On the other hand, lots of detail for Indonesia and Japan, for example.

I haven't used maps.me, but I'm now sold on offline maps. There was a thread on offline maps here a few months ago, and I didn't understand the benefits until I took the plunge myself; among other things, they are very good for following the progress of your own flights. I use baidu for China, and Google for everywhere else (in addition to China, there might be other areas in which Google doesn't support offline maps, but I've yet to find any).

I was in Shanghai yesterday and used Maps.me then I realized that I had downloaded the Jiangsu province but not Shanghai.
I find that the maps.me maps are not populated with much information. just a few hotels. If you are to use a map in Chinese, you may as well use Baidu that has tons of information including public transportation.

OSMAnd+ downloads all of China (about 250MB - a few minutes on wifi). You can also add the Wikipedia pages (which aren't that much use here!).

If you need that much detail and can't handle Baidu in Chinese (me, for example) then a VPN on your phone and Google maps will work. I have used this for getting around in the few Chinese cities that I've visited.

Dr. PITUK

As noted upthread, I was late to jump on the Baidu bandwagon because I didn't perceive the value of installing an additional--possibly intrusive--app. But, much like the offline maps concept, after I tried it, I was sold, hook/line/sinker.

Baidu has a small army working on maps, which blows Google out of the water. Public transportation is only one manifestation of this; I frequent a lot of unimportant neighborhoods in unimportant cities, and they typically have an amazing/current pulse on extremely unimportant noodle shops and 小卖铺 everywhere!

I can imagine that Baidu is somewhat challenging for people who can't read a great deal of Chinese, but am guessing that it is still more useful than Google for the vast majority of China visitors.

ETA: The new sections of SH lines 12 and 13 have been operational for almost a year, and Google/Bing/Yahoo still don't recognize them. I suspect that maps.me is in the same boat.

Maps.me have street names and station names in both Chinese and Pinyin. Merchant names depend. Western hotel chains likely have names in English.

I've previously use Google Ditu - now http://google.cn/maps

It all comes down to Chinese restructions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restri..._data_in_China

I personally would count on maps.me which I have used exclusively since end of Oct around BJ SH GZ and SZ vs google which is questionable behind the GFW.

My DW and other business associates had no problems with the English in maps.me.

Well try use Baidu Map then. Have no idea why they don't make a English since I believe won't be that hard.

1. 99.999% of the market understands Chinese
2. Making a decent English interface would be hard because Baidu maps are extremely local

Not sure that it is so simple. street names are easy, just go for the pinyin and not an English translation. I think that we would all agree on this one. But what about the name of businesses? Pinyin would not work for many places. Would translate Chinese to Yijia or IKEA?