Abstract Centricity is one of important concepts in urban Geography, which was originally brought forward and carried on an investigation into by a German famous geographer W.Christaller. It mainly measures the relative importance of a city as a provider of central goods and service for its peripheral region. On the early study, W.Christaller adopted phone index as a measurement unit and combined with the method of location quotient so as to judge the city's central status in the urban system. In recent years, a number of domestic scholars have inherited and developed the method, but on choosing the specific indexes in practice, they further considered the feature of China urban development, and made a great lot of researches on urban centricity. The result showed that the method is effective and feasible to judge the city's central status in the urban system. Their researches lay a good foundation of the centricity analysis of capital cities in western region of China in the article.On the basis of reviewing the relative researches on centricity at home and combining with the data from China statistical yearbook, the author respectively works out the centricity indexes of all capital cities except for Lasa city in western region in 1984,1995 and 2001.In light of the change of centricity index in different periods, the paper analyzes the variation of the central status of capital cities. According to the centricity indexes in 2001, it also try plotting out a centricity hierarchical system:the three cities of Chongqing, Chengdu, Xi'an are the first class which are to be deemed to be nationally influencing; the three cities of Kunming, Wulumuqi and Lanzhou are the second class which are considered regionally influencing; the other capital cities are the third class which are thought as respective province center. Finally, the paper makes an elementary judgment for tomorrow-spatial pattern of capital cities in western region of China. The paper covers five parts:①the status in quo of capital cities development in western region of China, ②the retrospection of urban centricity research at home, ③the choice of relative indexes and model, ④the centricity analysis of capital cities in western region, ⑤the issues to study further.
2005, Vol. 20 
