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Colloquium on Information Science:
HKUST Library Series no. 6 - 6 June 2002
Celebrating Special Collections : Scholarship and Beauty
Maps, Poems, and the Power of Representation
Zhang Longxi (張隆溪教授)
On a chilly day in the autumn of the year 228 B.C., Jing Ke, the famous assassin in ancient China, approached the King of the powerful state of Qin in the palace at Xianyang, presenting to the King a wooden box that contained the head of a renegade general whom the King wanted dead or alive, and another box with a map of the fertile Dukang area in the state of Yan. In a passage of breath-taking suspense and action that has immortalized Jing Ke as the archetypal assassin and tragic hero in Chinese imagination, the great historian Sima Qian (145-90 B.C.) wrote:
Ke took the map and handed it over. The King unfolded the roll, and when the roll of the map came to the end, a dagger suddenly appeared. Ke held the King by the sleeve with his left hand, while his right hand grabbed the dagger and started to move toward the King's chest. Before he could reach it, however, the King was startled and rose up so violently that he ripped off his sleeve. The King tried to draw his sword, but the blade was long and firmly stored in the sheath. In that moment of shock and chaos, he was unable to pull out the hard sword. So Jing Ke chased the King, who fled by running around the pillars in the palace.[1]
The rest of the story is known to almost every Chinese: Jing Ke failed his mission and was killed, and several years later, in 221 B.C., the Kingdom of Qin vanquished Yan and the other states to become the first unified Empire in Chinese history. What is of particular interest for our purposes here is the tremendous value obviously attached to the map of Yan, which was so attractive to the King of Qin that by presenting this map, Jing Ke could win the initial trust of the King to have an audience with him in person. Sima Qian did not describe that map in any detail, so it is difficult to visualize what it would look like, but it is possible that the map provided the state of Qin with valuable geographical information that might have helped it in its conquest of Yan some years later. The two things Jing Ke brought to the King - the map and the head of a renegade general the King wanted to kill so badly - represented two vital elements for gaining political power that the King desired most, namely the elimination of internal enemies and the further expansion of his territory to the outside. This famous episode of ancient history occurred in a time known as the period of the Warring States. When war was the major business for a king or prince, maps were valued mainly for the information they provided in warfare and in conquest of new territories. "All those who command an army must first of all examine and know the maps," as we read in a very early text, the chapter on maps in the book of Guanzi. "Only when one has the situation of a place, its ins and outs and all the intricacies completely in one's mind, can one move the troops and attack cities. To help one know what to do first and what next in action without ever losing the advantage of one's own position: that is the unfailing efficacy of maps."[2] In the famous Art of War, the great militarist thinker Sun Wu also says: "The shape of the terrain is an aid in war. . . . He who knows this will win the war, and he who does not know this will suffer defeat."[3]
The importance of maps for military use is certainly not lost on Chinese writers of literary fiction. In the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the most popular historical novel in traditional Chinese literature, there is the episode of Zhang Song presenting to Liu Bei a map of Western Sichuan, which was crucial for Liu Bei in gaining a foothold in the war of rival forces and in the establishment of the Kingdom of Shu. When Zhang Song urged Liu Bei to take control of Sichuan, Liu hesitated and said that it was a notoriously difficult area to march into, but Zhang Song showed him a detailed map and said: "Once you look at this map, it will take you no more than one day to know all the roads in Sichuan."[4] Another episode in the same novel tells the story of a powerful labyrinth-like trap set up by Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei's prime minister, the so-called ba zheng tu or "Eight Formations Diagram." That is a huge maze made of piles of stones in eight sections, and its name obviously refers to some kind of a drawing or a map, according to which the maze was built. These stone piles were described in mythological terms, for they were said to form such an intimidating deterrence to the enemy that they were equal to the force of "a hundred thousand fine soldiers."[5] Once the enemy general led his troops into this complex labyrinth, they could never find the way out, and that certainly shows the power of the map in military action.
From historical narratives and literary representations, then, we may see that the value of maps is very much related to their power and military use. This is not just the case in China, but also in the West. "Much of the history of European cartography," as Jeremy Black argues, "centers on its military rationale and application, and much of the cartography was prepared under military aegis, or for military purposes."[6] Maps provide useful information not only about the space for the movement of troops, but also about the location of enemy positions and distribution of their forces. "Intelligence gathering was and is a central aspect of the relationship between cartography and military concerns."[7] This may help us understand the importance and high value of maps as we see in the historical and literary examples mentioned above. We may see, then, that maps have a special relationship with power that is closer than that of any other kind of graphic representations.
"If power is about space, spaces were created through the exercise of power," Jeremy Black observes. "Cartography could be seen as central to this process."[8] In European history, map-making has been related to the power of representation, and cartography became not just a craft based on scientific observations in the age of Columbus, but a popular motif in art and literature stimulated by European discoveries and conquests in the sixteenth century. "Terrestrial space was overcome by the sixteenth-century voyagers, who had already circumnavigated the globe and were now seeking the north-east and north-west passages," as M. M. Mahood points out in discussing the poetic works of John Donne.[9] Writing in an age when new spaces were created through the exercise of power and increasingly accurate mapping of the globe, Donne described how quickly "On a round ball/A workman that hath copies by, can lay/An Europe, Afrique, and an Asia."[10] There are many references to maps and cartography in John Donne's writings, and anyone familiar with metaphysical poetry would know his famous conceit that compares two lovers to a pair of compasses, an instrument indispensable in map-making, as we see held in the hands of Vermeer's masterpiece, "The Geographer." The soul of his love, Donne writes, is "the fixt foot" that stays in the center, while the other foot obliquely circles around till it eventually comes back to be reunited with his love at home.[11]
These references to map-making clearly show that the discovery of the New World and increased knowledge about hitherto unknown territories had an impact on the entire sixteenth-century European society, and not just the scholarly community of scientists and natural philosophers. It is therefore not surprising that Donne, in a poem of seductive persuasion, would chart the lover's body as a map of the newly discovered America in making this bold request:
Licence my roaving hands, and let them go,
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O my America! My new-found-land,
My kingdome, safeliest when with one man man'd.[12]
The new-found America symbolizes the mysteries of the unexplored virgin or virgin land as well as the desire to take possession of the body as a small world all its own. The map image here is of course based on the idea of the human body as a microcosm corresponding to the universe as a macrocosm, a traditional idea imbedded in the medieval scholastic cosmography in which everything is related to everything else in the "Great Chain of Being." But the effectiveness of the image certainly depends on the power of maps that made the discovery of America an important event in Europe at the time. Here perhaps we have a most telling image that illustrates the relationship between maps and empires, knowledge and power, the excitement of new discoveries and the desire of possession that led to the colonization of the New World.
It would be a mistake, however, to fault John Donne for simply endorsing the colonization of America and the control of the female body as a carnal kind of colonization, for love is quite content, the poet argues, with exploration of its own world rather than the conquest of the world at large. Here the map of America is used as a contrast to the self-contained domain of love rather than a comparison with the body as a terra incognita, because love "makes one little roome, an every where," says the poet:
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let Maps to other, worlds on world have showne,
Let us possesse one world, each hath one, and is one.[13]
Not only that, but Donne also compared his own body to a map in one of his later poems written when he was sick and thought of dying. And this time, the map image and the metaphor of discovery have implications quite different from those as we saw earlier. The poet says:
- Whilst my physitians by their love are growne
- Cosmographers, and I their Mapp, who lie
- Flat on this bed, that by them may be showne
- That this is my South-west discoverie
- Per fretum febris, by these streights to die.[14]
The map and scientific exploration became prominent poetic topoi in Donne's works because science and poetry - indeed, Scholarship and Beauty as we have it in the title of our Colloquium - were not separate, and the excitement of new discoveries made possible by the advancement of learning fed the poet's imagination as it did the scientist's admiration of the wonders in nature. In John Donne and the other sixteenth-century metaphysical poets, as T. S. Eliot famously put it, "a dissociation of sensibility" had not set in between the rational and the imaginative, and poetry still integrated thought and feeling as one.[15] We can read the works of the great seventeenth-century poet John Milton in the same spirit. As William Kerrigan comments, Milton's "is an intellectual universe composed of theories, causes, explanations, arguments."[16] The nature of knowledge, both human and divine, is a major concern in Milton's most important work, Paradise Lost, and in that connection we may understand why he would describe the Angel Raphael as equipped with "the Glass/Of Galileo," that is, the telescope, in surveying the "Imagin'd Lands and Regions in the Moon."[17] Perhaps nothing can pay a greater tribute to the power of map-making than Milton's depiction of the creation of the world, in which he portrays the divine Creator in the image of a geographer or map-maker:
and in his hand
He took the golden Compasses, prepar'd
In God's Eternal store, to circumscribe
This Universe, and all created things.
One foot he centred, and the other turn'd
Round through the vast profundity obscure,
And said, Thus far extend, thus far thy bounds,
This be thy just Circumference, O World.[18]
Like the compasses and map-making in John Donne, Milton's imaginary picture of the Son of God charting the world out of chaos by using a pair of golden Compasses clearly indicates how powerfully such imagery of scientific inventions must appear to sixteenth and seventeenth-century poets and their readers.
Milton was fully aware of the scientific knowledge and inventions of his time. At the beginning of Book VIII when the Angel Raphael discoursed with Adam on astronomy, he implicitly raised questions about the Copernican theory of the heavens as contrasted with that of Aristotle, Ptolemy, and the medieval astronomers:
Whether the Sun predominant in Heav'n
Rise on the Earth, or Earth rise on the Sun,
Hee from the East his flaming road begin,
Or Shee from West her silent course advance.[19]
In the end, the poet left the questions open, but, as a devout Christian humanist, Milton discouraged the pursuit of such questions and had the Angel admonish Adam not to think of things beyond his capacity to know, because, says Raphael,
Heav'n is for thee too high
To know what passes there; be lowly wise.[20]
For poetic and religious purposes, Milton's universe remains traditional and terracentric, and whatever admiration he might have for scientific knowledge and the great inventions of his learned contemporaries, he subordinated science to philosophy and Christian doctrine. The map of the world in his poetic imagination also remains traditional, and he located China or Cathay in that traditional map at the uttermost east. In Book XI, Milton mentioned the Great Wall of China, "the destin'd Walls/Of Cambalu, seat of Cathaian Can," and also "Samarchand by Oxus, Temir's Throne," and "Paquin of Sinaean Kings."[21] Knowledge about China in his time was still limited, as the geography of the world was still understood largely in the biblical framework inherited from the Christian Middle Ages. The medieval mappamundi, as Alessandro Scafi observes, "was essentially a cartographic encyclopaedia. Its function was to provide a visual synthesis of contemporary knowledge. The makers of mappaemundi used texts and images to frame and display Christian history and belief in a geographical setting." It is therefore pointless to blame them for inaccuracies of representation since "geographical exactitude was not the main objective of these maps."[22] An old European world map in the HKUST Special Collection originally published in Hartman Schedel's Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493 may serve as a good example of the medieval mappamundi. In this map, the world is divided among Noah's three sons, Japheth at the western corner, Sem at the eastern corner, and Ham down in the south. The world in this map hardly resembles the geographical shape as we recognize in later and more precise maps, and the many illustrations, including seven fantastic figures of barbarians and monsters painted in a column to the left, all provide us with fascinating and valuable information of how the world was conceived by European cartographers and their viewers before 1500. European world maps changed significantly after 1500, which is a significant year that marked, as Scafi asserts, "the shift from medieval to modern thinking, from a holistic to a fragmented view of reality, from a mapping which sought to penetrate the mystery of the whole universe beyond human boundaries to a mapping which is contained strictly within the framework of analytical thought and Euclidean geometry, and from cosmography to geography."[23] Perhaps we may see medieval mappaemundi as powerful in a different sense, that is, they show the power of Christian ideology over the scientific interest in geographical knowledge, and they become powerful means to create a certain image of the world in the viewer's mind rather than representing the world with any concern for cartographical precision.
Chinese maps before the sixteenth century and even long after show a similar tendency to impose an ideological understanding of "All under Heaven" upon the shape of the represented world. Although the Jesuit missionaries brought to late Ming China Western map-making techniques and Matteo Ricci made world maps that first showed China as one of many countries in the world, geographical knowledge did not make appreciable advancement in China till the very late nineteenth century. As Zou Zhenhuan observes in a recent study, "Western geographical knowledge was disseminated in late Ming and early Qing within limits of a very small circle of scholars and was far from becoming part of the geographical common sense among the average Chinese."[24] Richard J. Smith also observes that "Chinese depictions of foreigners and foreign lands prior to the twentieth century indicate a clear emphasis on the 'cultural' and 'administrative' functions of maps and other illustrations over their value as 'scientific' documents. . . . Until forced to reconsider their craft by new political and cultural priorities, Chinese map-makers and other illustrators tended to depict the world not so much in terms of how it 'actually' was, but rather in terms of how they wanted it to be."[25] We are all familiar with the consequences of such a Sinocentric view of "All under Heaven" and therefore need not go into any detailed discussion except to say that modern Chinese culture has been enriched to the extent that it has stepped out of the shadow of this inadequate understanding to a more informed view of the world not only in terms of geography, but also in terms of culture and tradition.
In recent decades, maps and cartography have been put under scrutiny in Western scholarship, a phenomenon Denis Cosgrove described as "a startling explosion of academic, artistic and cultural interest in 'cartography' as an object of critical attention."[26] In understanding the nature of map-making not as a mere compilation of geographical information based on scientific observation and measurement, but as a construction of knowledge tendentiously defined by cultural norms and dominant ideologies, such critical scrutiny of maps has a close relationship with the postmodern endeavor to deconstruct all Enlightenment categories of truth, rationality and objectivity. Jeremy Black mentioned the works of Brian Harley as exemplary of such postmodern revision that "saw maps as essentially documents that contribute to the discourse of power," "as a form of control, even surveillance."[27] The changed emphasis led to a different set of questions, and for Harley, the focus was on "the morality of maps and the ethics of cartography."[28] A recent book by Denis Wood, The Power of Maps, offers yet another example. Wood maintains that moral and political questions are more interesting than scientific ones: "What is the significance of getting the area of a state to a square millimeter," he asks, "when we can't count its population Who cares if we can fix the location of Trump's Taj Mahal with centimeter accuracy when what would be interesting would be the dollar value of the flows from the communities in which its profits originate What is the point of worrying about the generalization of roads on a transportation map when what is required are bus routes Each of these windows is socially selected, the view through them socially constrained no matter how transparent the glass, the accuracy not in doubt, just . . . not an issue."[29] Well, is accuracy not an issue at all in maps Is the dollar amount the only thing one cares about with regard to a big building
The disclosure of the ideological position and cultural content of maps and map-making certainly has its value, but its findings are hardly surprising or even intellectually interesting. In fact, as Jeremy Black argues, such ideological determinism "suffered from a number of weaknesses, including a tendency to state the obvious, a simplification of, and a failure to understand the nature of, power systems, and a preference for style over substance. pater les bourgeois might be fun - it certainly gave life to lecture, or at least to lecturers - but it was, and is, strangely limiting."[30] With regard to maps and the geographical information they provide, and to science in general, I would argue that they are valuable precisely for their accuracy and usefulness. Here as in many other cases, knowledge is power. Francis Bacon's famous remark has often been misinterpreted as justifying control and hegemony, but the hegemony in Bacon's time was religion or Christian theology, from which he sought to establish the legitimacy of science and scientific exploration. Bacon often asserts that truth is twofold, that religion teaches the higher truth of God, while science explores the lesser truth of nature that is accessible to the necessarily limited and finite human intellect. What this means, as Basil Willey argued long ago, is that "Bacon's desire to separate religious truth and scientific truth was in the interest of science, not of religion. He wishes to keep science pure from religion."[31] Today, when science has become more predominant than religion, we may perhaps better appreciate the human and spiritual truth of life that is not to be exhausted by scientific methodology, but it would not be helpful to discard scientific truth completely from an overly politicized ideological position. A much more helpful attitude and much better balanced is to appreciate both science and whatever is beyond science, both knowledge and imagination, or again, as our Colloquium calls for - the appreciation of Scholarship and Beauty.
Zhang Longxi (張隆溪教授)
Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation
& Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Studies
City University of Hong Kong
Notes:
[1] Sima Qian司馬遷, Shi ji史記[The Great Historian's Records], juan 86 (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1959), pp. 2534-35.
[2] Dai Wang戴望, Guanzi jiaozheng管子校正[Guanzi with Amendments], Zhuzi jicheng諸子集成[Collection of Distinguished Philosophical Works], 8 vols. (Beijing: Zhonghua, 1954), vol. 5, p. 159.
[3] Cao Cao et al.曹操等, Sunzi shijia zhu孫子十家注[The Art of War with Ten Commentaries], Zhuzi jicheng諸子集成[Collection of Distinguished Philosophical Works], vol. 6, pp. 176, 177.
[4] Luo Guanzhong羅貫中, Sanguo yanyi三國演義[The Romance of the Three Kingdoms], eds. Shen Bojun沈伯俊and Li Ye李燁(Chengdu: Bashu shushe, 1993), chapt. 60, pp. 604-05.
[5] Ibid., chapt. 84, p. 854.
[6] Jeremy Black, Maps and Politics (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), p. 147.
[7] Ibid., p. 163.
[8] Ibid., p. 18.
[9] M. M. Mahood, Poetry and Humanism (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), p. 93.
[10] John Donne, "A Valediction: of weeping," in Louis L. Martz (ed.), English Seventeenth-Century Verse, vol. 1 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 59.
[11] Ibid., "A Valediction: forbidding mourning," p. 88.
[12] Ibid., Elegy 19, "Going to Bed," p. 38.
[13] Ibid., "The Good-Morrow," p. 43.
[14] Ibid., "Hymne to God my God, in my sicknesse," p. 130. Per fretum febris: fretum means both strait and raging heat (of fever), thus "through the straits of fever."
[15] T. S. Eliot, "The Metaphysical Poets," Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975), p. 64.
[16] William Kerrigan, "Milton's place in intellectual history," in The Cambridge Companion to Milton, ed. Dennis Danielson, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 255.
[17] John Milton, Paradise Lost, V.261, in Complete Poems and Major Prose, ed. Merritt Y. Hughes (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), p. 308.
[18] Ibid., VII.224., p. 351.
[19] Ibid., VIII.160, p. 366.
[20] Ibid., VIII.172, pp. 366-67.
[21] Ibid., XI.287, p. 441.
[22] Alessandro Scafi, "Mapping Eden: Cartographies of the Earthly Paradise," in Mappings, ed. Denis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), p. 63.
[23] Ibid., p. 70.
[24] Zou Zhenhuan鄒振環, Wan Qing xifang dilixue zai Zhongguo晚清西方地理學在中國[Western Geography in late Qing China] (Shanghai: Shanghai guji, 2000), p. 13.
[25] Richard J. Smith, Chinese Maps: Images of "All under Heaven" (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 78.
[26] Denis Cosgrove, "Introduction" to Mappings, p. 3.
[27] Black, Maps and Politics, p. 18.
[28] Ibid., p. 19.
[29] Denis Wood with John Fels, The Power of Maps (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 21.
[30] Black, Maps and Politics, p. 23.
[31] Basil Willey, The Seventeenth Century Background: Studies in the Thought of the Age in Relation to Poetry and Religion (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, n. d.), p. 37.