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Colloquium on Information Science:
HKUST Library Series no. 6 - 6 June 2002
Celebrating Special Collections : Scholarship and Beauty
China in Maps: Columbus to Kangxi
Roderick M. Barron
- Introduction
- Starting Point; Medieval World View
- 1493 World Map, Hartman Schedel
- Classical Influences
- Biblical / Religious Influences
- Travellers' Accounts
- Ptolemy's Ta[Bula] Superioris Indiae Et Tartariae Maioris, 1522
- Portuguese Influence
- Terza Ostro Tavola, Giacomo Gastaldi
- The Foundation Of European Cartography Of China
- Ortelius Chinae 1584
- Jesuit Influence
- Sinarum Regni Alioruq Regnoru Et Insularu Illi Adiacentium Descriptio Circa 1590
- Hondius Model
- Hondius China 1606
- John Speed The Kingdome Of China 1627
- Willem Blaeu China Veteribus Sinarum Regio Nunc Incolis Tame Dicta,1635
- First English Map Of China
- Samuel Purchas The Map Of China 1625
- Blaeu Martini Model
- Martino Martini Atlas Sinensis 1655
- Standardization: Sanson
- Chinese And European Collaboration
- Kangxi Atlas Huang Yu Quanlan Lu 1717
INTRODUCTION
I would like to start by thanking Professor Zhang for such a fascinating and stimulating examination of "Maps, Poems, and the Power of Representation".
I must also thank Mrs. Chang for inviting me to be part of these important festivities. It is a great honor & privilege to be here and to witness the official opening of the wonderful new Collections Room, for which occasion the China in Maps exhibition has been prepared.
I have been in the very fortunate position as a dealer to witness many wonderful pieces pass through my hands into this collection. In many ways it is the culmination of a map or book dealer's dream - to be involved in the formation, development and expansion of a single Collection & to see it brought to its ultimate conclusion in the opening of this superb new facility today, housing what is without doubt amongst the finest & most extensive institutional collection of early European (and Chinese) maps, Atlases & travel books relating to China to be found on the Asian Continent.
It is equally fitting that this superb collection, which so vividly reflects Europe's lasting fascination & cross-cultural exchange with China over many centuries, should be located here in Hong Kong, renowned commercial entrepot, cross-cultural melting pot, and for so long the meeting point, if not the revolving door, between China and the West.
The complete range and scope of the Collection is too extensive a subject for me to cover fully in my talk today. My aim is to give you a brief introduction to the history of the European mapping of China, and to introduce you to some of the more important early map highlights in the collection and to try & place them in the historical context in which they were printed & appeared.
STARTING POINT; MEDIEVAL WORLD VIEW
1493 WORLD MAP, Hartman Schedel
A good starting point in this survey is the wonderful World map published in 1493 just one year after the first Voyage of Christopher Columbus in Hartman Schedel's Liber Chronicarum or Nuremberg Chronicle.
It is an amalgam of medieval thought and expression, representing man's view of his world at the dawn of the modern Era and the Age of Discoveries. That world view is shaped by the writings of classical geographers and by the strong and enduring Biblical traditions that imbued daily life and customs in late Medieval Europe.
Classical Influences
Classical writers had encountered China through the ancient trading routes that snaked beyond the Caspian sea, over the Caucusus to the Orient - the so called Silk Road. It was this commodity silk - in the Greek serikon, in the Latin sericum that gave an all encompassing generic name to the region. The peoples inhabiting the regions along the Silk road came to be known as Seres and the region itself Sericum regio or Serica, as shown on Schedel's map. A more southerly trade route was also used to transport Chinese silk through India to Mesopotamia and Egypt. Those who used this southern route called China, where the silk was produced, Thin, possibly because of the name Ch'in, the empire of Shi Huang Ti (246-210B.C) and the region generally became known on later maps as Sina or Sinarum Regio.
Another classical term for China was Tamus or Tame, one of its easternmost peninsulas as described by 1st Century Roman geographer, Pomponius Mela. It was disseminated widely in the late 16th Century World and Asia maps of Gerard Mercator and his family. The term persisted, appearing on the China maps of Willem Blaeu & Jan Jansson in the 1630's.
Classical knowledge of the Orient was also handed down to medieval and early Renaissance scholars through the work of the second century Egyptian cartographer, Claudius Ptolemy, a work that lay virtually dormant & unnoticed for over 1000 years before being "re-discovered" & absorbed into mainstream European thought in the early Renaissance period.
Ptolemy's writings were transposed into manuscript & then printed, maps in the editions of his Geographia providing amongst the first widely disseminated visualization of the Orient of the early Renaissance period. The first printed edition of Ptolemy illustrated with maps was published in Bologna, Italy in 1477 & innumerable editions & revisions appeared over the next 100 years. One of the earliest derivatives of this Ptolemy World view was Schedel's World map of 1493.
Biblical / Religious Influences
The vision of China and the Far East in late Medieval Europe incorporated many elements derived directly from the Scriptures.
First and foremost was the division of the territories of the known World after the Biblical Flood, amongst the three sons of Noah - Shem, Ham & Japhet - as illustrated in the borders of Schedel's World map.
This tripartite division dovetailed conveniently with the tripartite division of the Medieval World into its three known Continents as represented in the so-called T-O Maps of the period. With East at the top, the O represented the limits of the known World, the vertical line of the T represented the Mediterranean, while the horizontal line represented the Rivers Nile & Don. Asia occupied the area above the horizontal line of the T, Europe the lower left quarter and Africa the lower right quarter. The scheme fitted well with scholars' belief that Asia was equal in size to Europe and Africa & that Shem, the supposed Biblical progenitor of humankind in Asia after the Deluge, would, as Noah's eldest son, have received the largest Continent.
Numerous European travelers' accounts relating to the Far East began to circulate in Europe from the 13th & 14th Centuries onwards, for example the chronicles of John of Plano Carpino, William of Rubruquis, Oderic of Pordenone, Sir John de Mandeville and not least Marco Polo. Evidence of their impact is reflected in surviving manuscript maps of the period, most vividly in Abraham Cresques' Catalan Atlas of c.1375.
Some of these writers, most notably de Mandeville, provided fanciful descriptions of strangely formed peoples living beyond the borders of Christendom which echoed Classical writers such as Pliny, Herodotus and Solinus.
This gallery of grotesques, often half-human, half-animal in form, vividly illustrates Schedel's World map - multi-armed men, hairy & single-breasted women, centaurs, single-eyed cyclops, wolf-men, Blemmyae (of headless human form with facial features in their chests); Ymantopedes (one-footed creatures whose large single foot provided shade from the heat of the Sun) and the Cynocephali (dog-headed peoples).
Interestingly shocking images of supposed local inhabitants, identical to those on the Schedel map, embellish the borders of Sebastian Munster's 1540 map Scythia beyond the Imaus Mountains, where present-day Mongolia and Northern China would be located.
TRAVELLERS' ACCOUNTS
It was the impact of the work of Marco Polo and the cartographic output resulting from the voyages of discovery of Christopher Columbus that transformed European maps in the early 16th Century.
Polo's classification & identification of the different regions of Eastern and South Eastern Asia was widely adopted on maps produced from medieval times right through the 16th & 17th Centuries.
The problem with the European vision of Eastern Asia in the late 15th and early 16th Centuries was that it suddenly had to be reconciled with the discoveries reported in the so-called New World following the voyages of Columbus.
As a result some European maps provide a fascinating hybrid vision of an amalgamated Amer-asian landmass in which the easternmost coastlines of Asia, as interpreted from the writings of Marco Polo, also formed the basis for depicting the new discoveries of Columbus in the New World.
And so it is that German scholar and cartographer Johann Sch�ner in 1533 writes: by a very long circuit westwards, starting from Spain, there is a land called Mexico and Temistitan in Upper India, which in former times was called Quinsay [China]; that is the City of Heaven, in the language of that Country.
The separation of these two visions did not take long to effect.
It was Italian Giacomo Gastaldi who in about 1561 provided the final clear separation of the landmasses of Asia and America through a reinterpretation of Marco Polo's writings. The newly formed Straits of Anian as depicted by Gastaldi proved enormously influential and were widely adopted by most European cartographers by the end of the 16th Century. Polo had stated that a large Gulf "extends for a two month's sail towards the north, washing the shores of Manzi on the south-east and of Aniu and Toloman besides many other provinces on the other side." He had further noted "The sea in which Japan lies is called the China Sea - that is the sea adoining Manzi, because in the language of the islanders "China" means Manzi"
Ptolemy's Ta[bula] Superioris Indiae et Tartariae Maioris, 1522
The first European map to truly focus on the region of China alone is the map Ta[bula] Superioris Indiae et Tartariae Maioris, produced in Ptolemy's Geographia of 1522 as published by Laurent Fries and reissued in subsequent editions of 1525, 1535 & 1541.
This new and modern map is the first to visualise Polo's writings in cartographic form on a separate map dedicated exclusively to the Far East region. Whilst no mention is given to the name China, Marco Polo's names are ascribed to different & specific regions of the map. The Port of Quinzay [Hangzhou] is identified on the Eastern coast, whilst offshore lies the single-island Zipangri [Japan]. Curiously no mention is given to Polo's Zaiton. The great Tartar Khan sits in a tented encampment in the upper right of the image. Polo's division between Cathay in the Northern regions of China and Mangi or Manzi in the South is clearly made here.
PORTUGUESE INFLUENCE
The arrival of the Portuguese in South East Asia in the early 16th Century led to the development of a post-Polo vision of the region based much less on theory or the tentative interpretation of early travelers' accounts but on first-hand experience & survey.
The Portuguese Jorge Alvarez arrived in the Pearl River delta about 1513/14. A reference to his voyage is found in the letter of Andrea Corsalis sent from India to Cosimo de Medici in January 1515. The earliest detailed Portuguese portolan charts to show China, appear around this date in a Book of manuscript sailing instructions, rutters, charts and drawings produced in Malacca by the Portuguese pilot Francisco Rodrigues. Amongst them is the first ever European chart of the Pearl River delta.
The Portuguese gradually extended their trading contacts beyond the Pearl River delta and along the coasts of Fujian & Zhejiang Provinces. From about 1554 they established an annual fair to exchange and trade goods on outer islands of the Pearl River delta. They established a permanent foothold when Macao was ceded by the Chinese in about 1557, by way of thanks for their assistance in expelling a local band of pirates who had made the place their stronghold.
The impact of the Portuguese presence in the region can be seen directly in the printed maps that began to appear in Europe in the second half of the 16th Century as represented on 3 maps in particular:
TERZA OSTRO TAVOLA
Engraved by Giacomo Gastaldi for Ramusio's Italian collection of early travel writings : Della Navigatione e Viaggi [Venice 1556]. Canton is named with Niampo (Ningbo) and Ainan (Hainan). Polo's Zaiton is still included.
INDIAE ORIENTALIS INSULARUMQUE ADIACENTIUM TYPUS
Map of South East Asia - Abraham Ortelius [Antwerp 1570]
Ortelius' map applies the term China , for possibly the first
time, to the regions that more or less encompass the present-day
territorial boundaries of the country. Polo's Southern Province of
Mangi now becomes Mangi que et Cin et China
EXACTA ET ACCURATA DELINEATIO CUM ORARUM MARITINARUM TUM ETIAM LOCORUM TERRESTRIUM QUAE IN REGIONIBUS CHINA....
Sea chart of Far East by Arnold van Langren for Jan Huygen van Linschoten's Itinerario [Amsterdam 1596]. Clear influence of the charts of contemporary Portuguese portolan chartmakers of the 1560-1580 period. Distinctive curved shrimp-like (ebi) outline of the islands of Japan. Korea is shown as a curious circular island.
THE FOUNDATION OF EUROPEAN CARTOGRAPHY OF CHINA
Ortelius CHINAE 1584
The first European Atlas map of China & the first to properly apply the name China to the region as a whole was published in 1584 in the third supplement or Additamentum of Abraham Ortelius World Atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrrarum.
The map is the prototype model in the typology of maps of China. It shows China with North oriented to the right of the page. The Great Wall is shown across its northern borders. The 15 individual provinces of China are identified for the first time. Parts of Western Japan are included but no detail is given to the Korean peninsula. The Pearl River delta is well detailed though Macao is shown on the Eastern side of the estuary. Chinqueo (Xiamen/Amoy) and Formosa are clearly denoted as is the clear opening of the Hangzhou Wan north of Ningbo (Liampo). Internally the detailed river systems including the Yellow River in the North and Yangtze in central and Eastern China are shown for the first time, together with 5 inland lakes, including two in central China which clearly equate with the Dengting Hu and Doyang Hu. To the north appear numerous tented Tartar encampments or yurts and in the northern & western borders the wheeled sail carts that so fascinated early European visitors & cartographers. The text on the reverse identifies the 240 principal cities by the Chinese term fu and the smaller setttlements as cheu. A number of Chinese characters are also provided in the text on the reverse, derived from the letters of the Jesuit Father Bernadino Escalantes (1577).
The map was widely adopted by European cartographers for the next two decades.
JESUIT INFLUENCE
It was the Jesuit influence in China that transformed European cartography from the late 1570's through to the early years of the 18th Century.
The Jesuit missionaries had previously been used to propounding the Catholic faith hand in glove with the warlike belligerence of the Spanish & Portuguese. Under the close direction of Alessandro Valignano in the late 16th Century, Jesuit missionaries in the East now transformed themselves into models of tolerance, cultural openness and accommodation. They were ready to adapt to local cultures and customs and adopt them as their needs required, both in the interests of potential conversion to the Faith and equally as a means of gaining greater knowledge of each country, its peoples, institutions & rulers.
In China this new direction found most visible expression in the work of Michael Ruggieri and Matteo Ricci. Ruggieri arrived in China in 1579 where he remained for a decade. His colleague Matteo Ricci arrived in Macao in 1582 and within two years had established, with Ruggieri, the first Jesuit mission inside China itself, at Zhaoqing, 100 kilometers west of Canton [Guangzhou].
It was in the application of science and cartography that both Ruggieri & Ricci expanded the original aims and objectives of Valignano. By attempting to expound the marvels and attainments of Western science, technology and cartography, the early Jesuits felt it would be possible to obtain greater respect for Western learning amongst the educated & ruling classes. With this respect gained, it might then be possible to lay the foundations of a deeper and more fundamental understanding of the Catholic Faith in China and, it was hoped, thereby obtain many more Chinese converts.
The immediate impact of this approach can be seen in Ricci's own description of the production of his first World map in Zhaoqing :
The Fathers had hung up in their hall a Map of the whole World...when the Chinese understood what it was, never having seen or imagined such a thing before, all the more serious-minded of them wanted to see it printed with Chinese characters, so as to understand its contents better. So the Father [Ricci himself using the third person] who knew something of Mathematics, having been a disciple of Clavius when in Rome, set about the task, helped by one of the literati, a friend of his : and before long they had made a map of the World bigger than the one in the house...It was the best and most useful work that could be done at the time to dispose the Chinese to give credit to things of the Faith. For up to then the Chinese had printed many maps of the World with titles such as "Description of the Whole World" in which China was all, occupying the field with its fifteen provinces; and round the edge they depicted a little sea where a few islets were dotted about, on which they wrote the names of all the kingdoms of which they had ever heard; and these [kingdoms] all put together would not have equalled the size of one of the provinces of China....When they saw the World so large [ on Ricci's map] and China in a corner of it...the more ignorant began to make fun of such a description but the more intelligent, seeing such an orderly arrangement of parallel lines of latitide and longitude...could not resist believing the whole thing true....It was printed again and again and all China was flooded with copies.
Whilst much has been made of the Ruggieri's & Ricci's influence on indigenous Chinese & Japanese cartography in the 16th & 17th Centuries, little direct evidence has hitherto been felt or seen on maps of China produced in Europe in this same period.
SINARUM REGNI ALIORUQ REGNORU ET INSULARU ILLI ADIACENTIUM DESCRIPTIO circa 1590
I would today like to draw attention to the apparently unique and bibliographically unknown printed map of China: SINARUM REGNI ALIORUQ REGNORU ET INSULARU ILLI ADIACENTIUM DESCRIPTIO [Rome ? circa 1590] which is displayed here for the first time and which has never before received close academic study.
This striking copperplate map shows all of the Far Eastern regions including parts of Indochina, China, the Philippines and Japan. This map is unique in finally & completely dispensing with Marco Polo's medieval legacy & its associated cartography.
This is the first European map to show a truly post-Polo vision of China, on a new & now familiar north-south projection, with 15 Provinces clearly distinguished and with the principal cities of each Province shown in stylised profile. The Jesuit Church at Zhaoqing is illustrated with the annotation: ecclesia patrum societatis (the Church of the Fathers of the Society (of Jesus)). The map is clearly based on a range of sources hitherto unavailable to other European cartographers. It includes the first detailed representation of Korea, shown not as an Island, as would be the case on most European other maps of the region for the next half century, but correctly as an elongated peninsula.
The map demonstrates clearly the emerging cross-cultural exchange between the Jesuits and Chinese. A descriptive table in Latin dominates the right side of the map, detailing the different administrative and regional divisions of each Province. These were traditionally on three levels: Prefectures (fu); subprefectures (zhou); and districts (xian). Further military and troop divisions within districts were identified by the terms wei (garrisons) and sou (sentry posts). These terms appear in romanised form on the map & the tabulations undoubtedly derive from Luo Hongxian's Kuang-yu-t'u, the Ming Atlas of China (modelled on earlier Yuan dynasty maps by Zhu Siben). Completed in 1541, the blocks were first printed in 1555, with six further editions in the period between 1558 & 1579. This was the first truly comprehensive indigenous Atlas of China.
Further comparison between the general outline and topographical detail of the map, and the general map of China (Yu Di Zong Tu) from the Ming Atlas, shows a number of similarities. Furthermore the map of the Frontier Province of Liadong (Liadong Bian Tu) in the Ming Atlas clearly shows the square-shaped extension of the Great Wall northeastwards into the Qianshan Mountains, a very curious & distinctive feature of this map of China.
It appears more than likely this map was published shortly after Father Ruggieri's return to Rome in 1590, probably drawing from Ricci's notes, translations, manuscripts & surveys brought back by Ruggieri to Rome. The map was probably part of an up-to-the minute report on China & the Far East produced for the Jesuit authorities in Rome, perhaps in preparation for the planned papal embassy to the Emperor of China, for which purpose Ruggieri had been recalled to Europe, a plan which unfortunately never materialised.
A hint of the importance of this map can be surmised from the only known manuscript rendering of it, a unique large-scale English manuscript map of China on vellum preserved in the archives of the British Library in London [B M Cotton Ms Aug I ii. 45]. This appears to replicate almost in its entirety all the cartographic, topographical & tabular information found on this printed map. This suggests the manuscript can only have been copied from an example of this printed map. The manuscript is annotated cryptically at the bottom of the title cartouche: From Madrid Ao 1609.
So it would seem that a copy of this printed map was in circulation in Spain in 1609 and that it was deemed sufficiently important and unusual in its content to warrant a close & detailed manuscript copy being made of it, possibly by an English spy, merchant or diplomat, very probably working under the auspices of the English East India Company. It is interesting to note that the English East India Company, first incorporated in 1600, had its Charter renewed by King James I in this same year 1609, granting it a perpetual monopoly on all trade East of the Cape of Good Hope.
Within 10 or 15 years - by the time of Willem Blaeu's World map of 1606 and Jodocus Hondius' map of China of the same date - an entirely new and different China model had been accepted by the most influential European cartographers. It is most curious therefore that this map and the outline of China that it depicted did not receive wider currency amongst European cartographers.
What is remarkable is the fact that it clearly forms the model for the outline of China, Korea & Japan used by Petrus Plancius for his spectacular World map of 1594, ORBIS TERRARUM TYPUS DE INTEGRO IN MULTIS LOCIS EMENDATUS auctore Petro Plancio, usually found in Jan Van Linschoten's Itinerario. Most of the details of this map are replicated in miniature on Plancius' World map, including the northeastern eastern extension of the Great Wall in Liaodong and the identification of the Jesuit church at Zhaoqing. The question must be asked why it did not subsequently obtain wider popularity & currency ?
Perhaps Plancius himself had no direct or first-hand knowledge of this map or its origins & was drawing from intermediary sources for his 1594 World map outline of the Far East. Perhaps it was the fact that, as the Jesuits became more established within China after 1589, they did not wish significant up-to-date information on the Country to become too widely available. Possession of such information might prove a potential threat either to their religious ambitions in China or to the commercial ambitions of their close Iberian associates & compatriots. It is possible that wider distribution was consequently suppressed.
The establishment of the English East India Company and its Dutch counterpart in 1602, the increasing number of Dutch and English voyages to Asia, and the resulting conflicts there with Catholic & Iberian powers, suggest that this may well have been the case.
This map's importance & cartographic significance in terms of the early mapping of China cannot be overlooked & certainly requires further and more detailed study.
Cornelis de Jode's map CHINA REGNUM first published in Antwerp in his rare World Atlas Speculum Orbis Terrae 1593, was until now considered the first European map of China on a north-south orientation. It also draws from the 1584 Barbuda map and from contemporary Portuguese information. It is distinguished by the wonderfully embellished corner vignettes illustrating features of contemporary Chinese life - Chinese sampans, wheeled sail-carts and tame fishing cormorants. Friar Orderic of Pordenone, a contemporary of Marco Polo's, noted in the late 13th Century, that these birds were to be seen "catching large numbers of fish and, even as they caught them, putting them of their own accord into baskets". The sight is still familiar today to travelers along the river at Guilin in Guanxi Province.
HONDIUS MODEL
Hondius CHINA 1606
A new European model for maps of China emerged with the Jodocus Hondius' map CHINA published in Amsterdam in 1606 in the expanded edition of the Mercator-Hondius Atlas. The map draws heavily from the earlier work of Ortelius, essentially merging together the outlines of the 1584 Luis Barbuda map of China and the 1595 Luis Teixeira map of Japan on a north-south orientation.
Hondius' model was adopted by many other European cartographers in the early 17th Century.
John Speed THE KINGDOME OF CHINA 1627
It was adopted and refined by Englishman John Speed in his 1627 map of China (and Japan) THE KINGDOME OF CHINA, published in the first English World Atlas, A Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World. Speed's map is the only map of China of this period to include decorative peripheral borders illustrated with vignette scenes of local interest. Marco Polo's Quinzay is illustrated in the top border alongside Macao whilst indigenous Chinese, Japanese & Burmese (Pegu) figures illustrate the side borders.
Speed's map is also the first European map to mention rhubarb. In the region of Tanguth Speed notes that "Out of this Kingdom men will have all rhubarb to be brought unto them of Europe". Marco Polo had noted that it was to be found in the Gansu area, and it had become renowned since medieval times in Europe for its efficacy in the treatment of digestive complaints & constipation. In an inventory of Marco Polo's possessions compiled long after his death in 1366 a bag of rhubarb is recorded. Indeed the importance of Gansu rhubarb to the Western digestion entered Chinese folklore, to such an extent that when Opium Comissioner Lin Zexu wrote to Queen Victoria in August 1838 requesting an end to the opium trade, he included a threat to prevent the export of rhubarb to the United Kingdom in the certain hope and belief that this would bring the constipated nation to its knees !
Willem Blaeu CHINA VETERIBUS SINARUM REGIO NUNC INCOLIS TAME DICTA,1635
A refinement of the Hondius China map model came with the work of Willem Blaeu, official cartographer to the Dutch East India Company. His map of China CHINA VETERIBUS SINARUM REGIO NUNC INCOLIS TAME DICTA, was first published in Amsterdam in 1635, & draws from the surveys of the Far East made by his Dutch colleague and engraver, Hessel Gerrtisz. This new model was also adopted by Blaeu's great rival Jan Jansson.
FIRST ENGLISH MAP OF CHINA
Samuel Purchas THE MAP OF CHINA 1625
The honor of being the first English text map of China falls to THE MAP OF CHINA published by Samuel Purchas in 1625 in Purchas his Pilgrimes. This map is unusual in that it draws clearly and directly from a single Chinese source, "a map of China in the Chinnish language". This map according to Purchas had been obtained by the English Captain John Saris, whilst working for the English East India Company in Java between 1605 & 1609. He had brought it back to England in 1614 and given it to the English historian & travel writer Richard Hakluyt. Purchas notes:
The original map whence this present was taken and contracted, was by John Saris....gotten at Bantam of a Chinese in taking a distresse for debts owing to the English Merchants; who seeing him carefull to convey away a Boxe, was more carefull to apprehend it, and therein found this map...The Original is above four foot one way, and almost five foot the other, wherof a yard and some four inches is the map itself. The rest are China discourses touching the said Map in their characters & lines.....which are here omitted.....as not understood......and so we give you here a true China, the Chinoise themselves being our guides and the Jesuites there both Examiners and Interpreters.
The map is finely embellished with portraits of Matteo Ricci and a Chinese man and woman. It was copied almost exactly by German Johann Theodore de Bry in 1628 and also appeared in slightly revised form in the rare 1655 English translation of Jesuit Alvarez Semmedo's History of that Great and Renowned Monarchy of China.
BLAEU MARTINI MODEL
Martino Martini ATLAS SINENSIS 1655
The pinnacle of 17th Century Jesuit achievement in terms of the European cartography of China is the Atlas Sinensis of Jesuit Martino Martini [1614-1661] first published by Johannes Blaeu, son of Willem, in Amsterdam in 1655. Martini was the Jesuit superior in Hangzhou. He had entered China in 1643 & for 3 years traveled widely throughout the country, even as far north as the Great Wall, collecting materials for his surveys and determining the astronomical positions of many towns and geographical features. In about 1650 he decided to return to Rome. On his return voyage to Europe he was shipwrecked in Norway from whence he made his way to Rome via Amsterdam, there enlisting the support of the Blaeu publishing house to arrange the engraving & publication of the surveys which he had compiled. Johannes Blaeu notes in his diary that: the Reverend Father Martinus Martinius comes from India and brings with him the figurations and descriptions of the Empire of China. He insists that I print and publish these. Therefore I leave off all other things for the time being in order to push forward this work.
The Atlas was comprehensive in its treatment, assigning individual maps to each of the fifteen Provinces of China as well as providing general maps of both China and Japan. It was immediately incorporated by Blaeu as Volume VI of his ever expanding Novus Atlas, which was further expanded in his monumental 12 volume Atlas Maior from 1662 onwards (forming part of Volume X).
The Blaeu-Martini Atlas provided a degree of standardization in the European vision of China in maps that developed progressively over the next 80 years. It re-established the peninsula model of Korea, & on a model far more refined and accurate than that later adopted by D'Anville and the Jesuit cartographers in China in the early 18th Century.
Martini's 15 Provincial maps of China, with their highly decorative cartouches, also provided attractive life-like illustrations of contemporary China, often seen for the first time - its Emperor and Empress, its peoples, gods & deities, commodities & manufactures, flora and fauna. For example the cartouche of Xensi Province contains an illustration of the now rare Pere David's deer.
Amongst the finest Martini derivatives are a series of maps of China and its provinces by the Venetian cartographer Vincenzo Coronelli [c.1692], the large two-sheet China map embellished with illustrations of scientific and mathematical instruments, symbolic of Jesuit power & influence in 17th Century China.
STANDARDISATION; SANSON
The problem of standardization in the European mapping of China was addressed enthusiastically by the mid 17th Century French cartographer, Nicolas Sanson.
Sanson tried to reconcile the work of 5 different 17th Century Jesuit cartographers: Matteo Ricci, Michele Ruggieri, Michael Boym, Martino Martini & Alvarez de Semmedo. In 1658 his detailed Considerations on this subject were published, the conclusions of which encapsulate the frustrations faced by 17th Century European cartographers attempting to produce truly accurate maps of China in this period:
I have made these Observations to permit recognition of the fact that hardly any confidence may be placed in the majority of Relations which come from Far Away. If those Fathers who are from one of most famous Orders (of Jesuits) which exists today in Christendom and in which there are the greatest number of the ablest writers of the Time, after spending several years in China and seeing the Court, communicating with the best Scholars and receiving the finest Memoirs from the Country, which they assure us to be very particular and very exact; if I say those Fathers differ so much and most often contradict each other, in the Description and in the Relation of the same things which must be known, what are we to expect of what they tell us about certain Regions whose names could have hardly become public and where neither letters not safeguards exist ? Nevertheless, let us say in the defense of these Fathers that their principal purpose being only to introduce and advance Christianity in China, the Maps and Memoirs which they give us about her were taken from various authors of the Country who published them more or less exactly, according to their capacity; we now know that their capacity was not up to the point we had been led to believe.
CHINESE AND EUROPEAN COLLABORATION
The transformation in the European mapping of China came with the influence of the French King Louis XIV, the Chinese Emperor Kangxi (1662-1722) and the French Jesuit Missions of the late 17th and early 18th Century. "The great epoch in the geographical history of China begins in the year 1687" wrote the French author Vivien de Saint Martin. This saw the first French Jesuit mission comprising Fathers Tachard, Gerbillon, Videlou, Le Comte and Bouvet arriving in Canton under the aegis of the French Academy of Sciences. Bouvet returning to Paris in 1698 after 9 years reported that "the Emperor Kang Hi, who is deeply interested in European science, had charged him to recruit many more scholars, especially mathematicians and astronomers, in order to carry out works projected and already begun under his august protection". By 1701 two further French voyages brought 9 more Jesuit Fathers to China.
With this growing Jesuit skill pool and the Chinese Emperor's interest in the interior mapping of China, began one of the most detailed and systematic surveys of the country & its outlying regions hitherto attempted, completed with a rapidity & methodology that is truly remarkable given its grand scale. Begun in 1688, within 30 years the whole of Imperial China & a number of surrounding regions had been surveyed.
The Jesuits benefited from the support of the Emperor in allowing access to every corner of the Empire. Scientific developments in triangulation & astronomical cartography (for example using observations of eclipses of the Earth's Moon & Moons of Jupiter) enabled them to plot the coordinates of longitude and latitude (taken from the meridian of the Paris Observatory) for over 600 locations across the country. All measurements were reduced to the standard Chinese distance of li, an Imperial edict of 1704 establishing that 200 Chinese li should represent one degree of longitude. This allowed the Jesuits to convert Chinese distances to the European coordinate system and thereby produce a standardization of scale and level of accuracy hitherto unattainable, even in European cartography itself.
Some outlying tributary regions such as Tibet and Korea were unable to be mapped at first hand by the Jesuits, and the geographical information had to be compiled indirectly from other local sources. The maps of these regions consequently suffered greater inaccuracies than those regions of China proper.
The remarkable feature of the Jesuit surveys of the Kangxi period is that they achieved currency not only in China but also in Europe. For the first time ever, both Europeans and Chinese had access to almost standardized maps of China that came from exactly the same sources.
Kangxi Atlas Huang yu Quanlan Lu 1717
The Kangxi Atlas Huang yu Quanlan Lu was first published in 1717 with a definitive expanded edition in 1721 covering all regions of China.
Within 4 years of this definitive edition having being published in China, a copy had reached Paris where it came into the hands of the Jesuit Father Jean Baptiste du Halde. Enlisting the assistance of the Royal French cartographer, D'Anville, in 1735 Du Halde published his Déscription Géographique.... de L'Empire de la Chine... with D'Anville providing 42 general and regional maps, derived directly from the Kangxi Atlas, to accompany the text.
Within 2 years D'Anville's maps had also been republished separately in Holland in the Nouvel Atlas de la Chine [The Hague 1737].
The judgement of the French geographer Lenglet-Dufresnoy writing in 1742 probably reflects the generally held European opinion of the day: "Thanks to this description, much more perfect than the work of Martini, everyone now knows China with as much detail and precision as France or the different States of Europe".
A unique combination of factors brought about this rapid transformation in the European cartographic vision of China in the early 18th Century. No longer was it relevant or important that China was "farthest remote from Christendome" as John Speed had put it - China had finally been brought into the European cartographic mainstream. It is a remarkable legacy that still impacts on the cartography and geography of China in the 20th and 21st Centuries. As the great French sinologist and explorer, Paul Pelliot, noted in 1926 "For most of the regions of China itself, we are still reduced to using the framework established by the reports of the Jesuits in the first quarter of the 18th Century"
I could speak for a good deal longer and take you into many other fascinating areas of the Library's Map collections. Time, however, is of the essence and my allocated 40 minutes is up ! I finish with the words of Dr. John Dee, chaplain to Queen Elizabeth I, who wrote that :
Some to beautify their Halls...or Libraries with, some others for their own journeys directing into Far Lands or to understandeth other men's travels...liketh, loveth, getteth & useth maps, charts & geographical globes...
Today's Exhibition of China in Maps undoubtedly beautifies the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology Library & its Special Collections Room. The unique vision of Mrs. Chang & the staff of the University Library & their interest, liking & love of maps has enabled the Library to "getteth" one of the finest cartographic collections in Asia, a resource that scholars & map-lovers not only in Hong Kong but around the world, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, will now be able to "useth" & enjoy long into the future.
Roderick M. Barron
Antique Map Specialist, Kent, England