Recent studies have demonstrated the importance of LUCC change with climate and ecosystem simulation,but the result could only be determined precisely if a high-resolution unde rlying land cover map is used.While the efforts based satellites have provided a good baseline for presenl land cover,what the next advancement in the research about LUCC change required is the development of reconstruction of historical LUCC change,especially spatially-explicit histo rical dataset.Being different from other similar studies,this study is based on the analysis of historical land use patterns in the traditional cultivated reqion of China.Taking no account of the less important factors,altitude,slope and population patterns are selected as the major d rivers of reclamation in ancient China,and used to designthe HCGM(Histo rical Cropland Gridding Model,at a 60 km×60 km resolution),which is anempirical model for allocating the historical cropland inventory data spatially to grid cells ineach polltical unit.Then we use this model to reconstruct cropland distribution of the study area in 1 820,and verify the result by prefectural cropland data of 1 820,which is from thehistorical documents.The statistical analyzing result shows that the model can simulate the patterns of the cropland distribution in the historical pe riod in the traditional cultivated region efficiently.