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In the study of the defense capacity of ancient military settlements, most existing studies have evaluated the defense capacity of citadels qualitatively from a historiographical perspective. There are fewer quantitative studies on defense efficiency in a specific regional context. This paper takes the coastal defense citadels system of Zhejiang in the Ming Dynasty of China as the research object. It adopts a combination of digital historical data mining and quantitative research to study the defense efficiency of the military defense area in Zhejiang in the Ming Dynasty. This paper first analyzes the defense pattern of Zhejiang's sea defense citadels system in the Ming Dynasty. It determines the control points of defense groups, quantifies the defense group area with a Voronoi diagram, and classifies and assigns the entropy value to the deployment data of guard forts in historical data. Finally, the assigned forces are superimposed on the defense area to obtain the quantified defense efficiency of each defense group, and the defense results are verified. This paper innovatively proposes an "area-force" perspective. It introduces spatial segmentation and quantitative research methods to study the defense efficiency of a specific regional defense group system in ancient times. It proves that this method is feasible and can be applied to the study of other ancient military defense areas. It also expands the scientific perspective of ancient military fortification systems, which can contribute to systematically preserving ancient military settlement heritage on a larger scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tan, L.; Zhou, J.; Zhang, Y.; Liu, J., and Liu, H., 2020. Correlation between the construction of Zhejiang coastal military settlements in the Ming Dynasty and the natural terrain. In: Gong, D.; Zhang, M., and Liu, R. (eds.), Advances in Coastal Research: Engineering, Industry, Economy, and Sustainable Development. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 106, pp. 381–387. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. The military settlement for the coastal defense of Zhejiang Province in the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644) is representative of military settlements throughout ancient China. The distribution of military power was closely related to the natural terrain, and its military hierarchical structure conformed to fractal systems. Based on fractal theory, the box dimension method, which has been widely used in geography, was selected to calculate the geomorphic fractal dimension of coastal-defense settlements within a certain range. The traditional box-counting method was optimized by ArcGIS to obtain the geomorphic-complexity index. By analyzing the correlation between this index and the military-force scale data extracted from historical books, this article breaks through the qualitative conclusions of general studies and obtains the quantitative influence of the complexity of the natural terrain on military construction, especially on the distribution of the size of garrison troops. This method quantifies complex concepts through fractal dimensions and provides a new idea for research on the influence of the natural environment on the formation of traditional settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]