ABSTRACT
Mandelbrot (1967) raised the question, “How long is the coast line of Britain?” and in the same vein I would like to raise the question, “How long is the coastline of China?” It was reported as 9,000 km in the 1920s and then as 11,000 km in the 1950s. Even later, in the 1960s, it was measured as 14,000 km, based on an aerial photogrammetric survey, with a map scale of 1:100,000, and 18,000 km, based on aerial photogrammetric survey with a map scale of 1:50,000. Can it be possible that the length of the coastline of China has doubled in size over the last 50 years? The element of uncertainty is obviously present in the measured value of the coastline length. This uncertainty may be caused by such factors as uncertainty inherited from insufficient knowledge of the coastal regions of the natural world, uncertainty in our cognition or interpretation of the coastline, error in the measurement technology and measurement operational procedure, or even uncertainty in the digital representation of the coastline in different scales in the computer environment.
