The problems of mapping the land use and land cover of a large area of central Guangdong Province of China from LANDSAT MSS data were examined with reference to the manual and digital approaches. Based on intensive field study of a test site in the study area, we discovered the importance of topographic effects, slopes, seasons, cropping system and the intensity of land use in affecting the accuracy of the resultant maps. It was concluded that visual interpretation was essential in providing the level of reference required for the image interpreter to perform the digital analysis satisfactorily. In view of the coarse spatial resolution of the LANDSAT MSS data it is recommended that the most straightforward digital analysis involving the use of the supervised approach with the minimum Euclidean distance classification and an iterative selection of training areas be adopted for the land-use/land-cover mapping of the whole study area to achieve an accuracy of 80 per cent for eight level I and fifteen level II categories of the land-use and land-cover classification scheme.