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China geocoding API for developers

If your app touches the China market, you'll eventually need to turn addresses into coordinates — and back. The local leaders (Amap, Baidu) are excellent but gated behind Chinese accounts. Here's the developer-friendly path.

The China-specific headache

Chinese addressing is non-trivial: districts, ambiguous place names, and GCJ-02 coordinate encryption that doesn't line up with global WGS-84. Rolling your own integration against Amap or Baidu means account setup, key management, and format wrangling.

One endpoint for both directions

POST /v1/geocode
Authorization: Bearer <your_key>
{
  "address": "北京市朝阳区建国路88号",
  "action": "encode"
}

Switch action to decode to go from coordinates to an address. Same key as your LLM and SMS calls.

Why bundle it

Geocoding almost never travels alone — it shows up next to maps, delivery, and user profiles. Keeping it on the same gateway as your LLM and SMS means one integration, one balance, one bill. For China-facing products that's a meaningful operations simplification.