Ferdinand von Richthofen, a famous German geographer and geologist, had four years’ field investigation in China from 1868 to 1872.The publication of his research has provided references and platforms for western countries to understand more about China, especially the terms as “the Silk Road” coined by him has been widely used. Even though his academic contribution to geology and geosciences of China has been well recognized, the significance of Richthofen’s research in human&economic geography from contemporary perspective has not been well addressed yet. Firstly, this paper analyzes the political, economic and cultural backgrounds of Richthofen’s field investigation in China, which include political power expansion of Germany outside Europe, economic prosperity and technological revolution in Western Europe, academic orientation of higher education in Europe, religious and cultural communication between the East and the West, and the struggled situation of China at that time. Based on the documentaries related to Richthofen’s travel in China, the second part outlines his routes and contents of each investigation, which involved in cities opened to foreign countries as commercial ports and cities playing important roles as trade centers along “the Silk Road”. In his travel diary, Richthofen analyzed the locational change of main hub cities, including Hankou, Jiujiang, Wuhu,Zhenjiang,Guangzhou,Shantou,Ningbo etc., and recorded transaction networks of main commodities related to agricultural and manufacture products. In the third part, the significance of Richthofen’s research in human & economic geography from contemporary perspective is summarized, listed as regional and locational analysis, flow and network analysis, regional differentiation and human-territory relationship analysis, institutional and cultural analysis. Some classic thoughts in contemporary Economic Geography such as spatio-temporal correlation, regional differentiation and spatial connection can be abstracted from Richthofen’s research. This indicates that Richthofen is both a geologist and a geographer with interdisciplinary thinking, which deserves to be highly evaluated. It finally suggests that regional cooperation based on mutual understanding and cultural communication might be in the core of the successful implementation of the Belt and Road Initiative within related countries, which still needs more efforts to be put into. With cultural communication and bilateral cooperation between countries alongside the Belt and Road, economic integration to a higher level is expected to be achieved in the future.
