In this paper, 3-D velocity images of the crust and upper mantle beneath the Nanbei tectonic zone of China are constructed using P-wave travel time residuals of earthquakes, with the data supplied by China's seismic networks and the International Seismic Centre.During the model parameterization in the tomographic inversion the interpolation function of grid node velocities is used as the space function of velocity, and the velocity function is allowed to be discontinuous. The difficulties caused by large memory demand and high computing cost in solving the system of equations are avoided by utilizing the least squares QR decomposition algorithm. Thus, the stability of the algorithm is ensured. Though resolution images are not derived in the inversion process based on the resolution theory of Backus and Gilbert, a covariance resolution method is put forward by the authors. The resolution analyses have proved the reliability of the image results. 3-D ray tracing is conducted to obtain the ray paths in a s