About the Maps:

The Korean War Topographic Map Collection made available on this website was produced by the U.S. Army Map Service (A.M.S.) with some sheets published in cooperation with the Republic of Korea Army Map Service (R.O.K.A.) between the years 1945-1955. Most of the sheets are dated between the war years of 1950-1953.

Our collection consists of 160 map sheets from the set of nearly 700. Most fall within South Korea and some have more than one edition, bringing the total number of maps in the collection to almost 200. Some maps are monochrome with Sino-Korean characters while later editions tend to be in colour with text in English and place names in romanized letters.

Although they do not contain military annotations, they provide a rich topographical database of information which can aid the researcher to comprehend puzzling aspects of terrain or to locate vanished villages, road networks and landmarks. They should be of particular interest to historians and genealogists but can also be used by anyone interested in obtaining a visual accompaniment to related texts, documents and records.

About the Images:

The maps were electronically captured with a Colortrac SmartLF GX+T56 scanner at 600 dpi optical, 24-bit tonal resolution and saved in .TIF (archival), JPEG (thumbnail) and JPEG2000 (scalable) formats.

Permitted Use of the Map Images:

McMaster University Library is providing digital access to these topographic maps, and the ability to download high resoultion copies (600 dpi, 1GB, .TIF), for non-commercial purposes only. For allowable use of the images found on this website, see the Creative Commons License.