The scope of this list is limited to capital cities of first-level administrative divisions such as provinces, autonomous regions, municipalities, and special administrative regions, also including sub-provincial cities which are governed by a province but administered independently in many ways from a province.
Capital 
Direct-administered municipality 
East 
South 
West 
North 
Central 
Special Administrative Region (SAR)Sub-provincial cities have a status that is below that of the municipalities, which are independent and equivalent to provinces, but above other, regular prefecture-level cities, which are completely ruled by their respective provinces. However, these sub-provincial cities are marked the same as other provincial capitals (or a prefecture-level city if the city is not a provincial capital) on almost all maps.
In total, there are five sub-provincial cities that are not themselves provincial capitals. These five cities have been designated as "Cities with Independent Planning Status" (Chinese: 计划单列市; pinyin: Jìhuá Dānliè Shì).
With the exception of Fuzhou, the provincial capital of Fujian Province, the provincial capitals of the other four provinces listed above – Guangzhou, Shenyang, Jinan, and Hangzhou – are themselves sub-provincial cities. Before 1997, when Chongqing was a sub-provincial city of Sichuan Province, provincial capital Chengdu was also a sub-provincial city.
