Cultural transformation (including knowledge innovation, ideological emancipation and slogan publicity, etc.) is one of the most important drivers of changes in water management policies. Earlier studies into water culture were mainly based on qualitative methods. However, using only qualitative methods, it is difficult to reveal the stage characteristics of water culture evolution objectively and accurately. Mapping knowledge domains, a rising knowledge discovery method, can holistically reveal the sources of knowledge and the laws of its development. This paper is devoted to exploiting its potential as a quantitative method for researches targeting at water culture evolution. By extracting the key words related to water from People’s Daily, knowledge domains on water culture evolution in China during 19462012 are mapped and interpreted, based on which the water culture evolution is unveiled. By comparing the water culture evolution with changes in water policies, stages of water resource development and extreme hydrological events, it is found that there exist clear relationships. This convinces us that mapping knowledge domains could play an effective role in quantitative research on water culture evolution. Further steps towards better quantitative researches on water culture evolution using this method include the enhancement of the universality of newspapers, improvement on the accuracy of key words extraction, and increase in the precision of visualization analysis.