Abstract: The currency of geographic data refers to its consistency with respect to the real world, and plays a critical role in geographic information service and applications. In order to improve the quality of geographic information service, State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping of China had launched a five year’s national campaign to update 1:50,000 topographic database. This paper outlines the technical design and development of this national updating engineering, which adopts a full coverage updating strategy characterized by all element topographic data modeling, change detection in all related areas, and whole process data quality controlling. High resolution image-based updating and large-scale data generalization-based updating were developed and used as two majors updating techniques. A technical system for massive updating production has been developed and equipped to a large number of production units.