A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Fig. 7 Modern map of East Asia showing the regional situation in the late fourteenth century.

  By 1395, the star map had been completed by the king’s team of astronomers led by (1352–1409), a Neo-Confucian reformer and Assistant Councillor in the State Council, the highest position in the new regime. was already at work on another map, this time of the entire world, and by 1402 it was finished. The original has not survived, but three copies are still in existence, all of them currently in Japan. The copy held in the University Library in Kyoto and recently dated to the late 1470s or 1480s, is generally believed to be the earliest and best preserved, and includes the original preface written by . Entitled Honil kangni kukto chi to, or ‘Map of Integrated Regions and Terrains and of Historical Countries and Capitals’, it is better known simply as the Kangnido map (an abbreviation of its full title). It is the earliest surviving dated example of an East Asian map of the world, predating all Chinese and Japanese examples, the first cartographic representation of Korea, and the earliest Asian map to show Europe.5

  The Kangnido map, exquisitely painted in ink on silk with gorgeous illuminated colours, is a beautiful and imposing object. The seas are olive-green and the rivers blue. Mountain ranges are marked by jagged black lines, with smaller islands shown as circles. All these features are offset against the rich yellow ochre of the earth. The map is criss-crossed with Chinese characters in black ink identifying cities, mountains, rivers and key administrative centres. Measuring 164 × 171 centimetres, and originally attached to a baton, allowing it to be unrolled from top to bottom, it was probably designed, like the star map, to hang on a screen or a wall in a prominent location such as the Palace. Just as the star map situated the dynasty under a new heaven, the Kangnido map located it on a new representation of the earth.6

  Where, as we saw in Chapter 3, Christian maps placed east at the top, and many Islamic maps chose south, the Kangnido map is oriented with north at the top. The world is one continuous land mass, with no separate continents or encircling sea. Its rectangular dimensions, together with the land dominating the top of the map, seem to show a flat earth. At its centre is not Korea, but China, a large, pendulous land mass stretching from the west coast of India to the East China Sea. Indeed, China is so prominent that it seems to absorb the Indian subcontinent, which loses its west coast, while the Indonesian archipelago and the Philippines are reduced to a series of tiny circular islands bumping along the map’s bottom. China’s pervasive political and intellectual influence can also be seen in the inscription at the top of the map, directly below which is a list of historical Chinese capitals, followed by descriptions of contemporary Chinese provinces, prefectures and routes between them.

  To the east of China lies the map’s next largest land mass, Korea, surrounded by what appears to be a flotilla of small islands; these are in fact naval bases. At first glance, the mapmaker’s depiction of his native country seems remarkably close to the modern outline of Korea, especially when contrasted with portrayal of Sicily, or even Richard of Haldingham’s illustration of England. Despite the flattened northern border, Korea is shown in astonishing detail. Its 425 identified locations include 297 counties, 38 naval bases, 24 mountains, 6 provincial capitals, and the new capital of Hanyang, prominently marked by a red, crenellated circle.7

  In the bottom right-hand corner of the map floats the region’s other major power, Japan, far south-west of its actual position. Its forked tip points menacingly up towards China and Korea. To compensate for this apparent threat, Japan’s size is diminished relative to Korea, which appears three times its size, when in fact Japan is half as big again. Its westernmost island, Kyushu, is shown pointing northwards, and the actual position of the archipelago has been been rotated clockwise by ninety degrees.

  Even more surprising to modern eyes is the map’s portrayal of the world to the west of China. Sri Lanka looms large off its west coast (rather than south-east of India), but the wedge of the Arabian peninsula is quite recognizable, as is the Red Sea and the west coast of Africa. More than eighty years before the first Portuguese voyages discovered that the continent was circumnavigable, the Kangnido map shows Africa with its now familiar southern tip, although its overall size is massively underestimated (Africa’s land mass is more than three times larger than that of modern-day China). A further peculiarity is that the continent is shown with what looks like an enormous lake at its centre, although this could also represent the Sahara desert. Many of the locations shown in Africa, Europe and the Middle East are Chinese transcriptions of Arabic place names, indicative of the pervasive reach of Islamic mapmaking even at this relatively early stage (Korea represented the limits of geographical knowledge).8

  Above Africa is an equally intriguing depiction of Europe. The Mediterranean is shown (although confusingly not shaded green like the rest of the map’s seas) in a rudimentary but recognizable shape, as is the Iberian peninsula. Alexandria is represented by a pagoda-like object. A capital city, possibly Constantinople, is marked in red, and the outline of Europe contains an estimated 100 place names, most of which still await a convincing translation. Even Germany is shown, spelled phonetically as ‘A-lei-man-i-a’.9 At the very edge of the map is a tiny rectangle which appears to represent the British Isles, but is more likely to show the Azores, the westernmost point in the Geography, which are probably reproduced because of the partial transmission of Ptolemy’s ideas.

  The map’s knowledge of the names and shapes of Africa and Europe might be inherited from Ptolemy, but that is where his influence ends. The Kangnido map contains no apparent graticule, scale or explicit orientation; not surprisingly, it offers a more detailed perspective on the South Asian region at the point where Ptolemy’s coordinates dwindle into increasingly speculative geography, and his place names disappear. In contrast to medieval Christian and Islamic maps such as those produced in Hereford or Sicily, with their shared Greek heritage, the Kangnido map draws on very different cartographic conventions rooted in Korean and ultimately Chinese perceptions of the earth’s place in the wider cosmos.

  Unlike the disparate social and cultural inheritance of the Graeco-Roman world, which spawned a variety of competing religious beliefs and political worlds, pre-modern East Asia was broadly shaped by one universal empire: the Chinese. For centuries China saw itself as the unquestioned centre of legitimate imperial authority, ruled by an emperor who regarded himself as leader of the civilized world (or tianxia, ‘all under heaven’). Satellite kingdoms like Korea were bit-part players in the grand Chinese scheme of things; peoples beyond the Chinese sphere were dismissed as largely irrelevant barbarians. Governing a vast and relatively well-defined empire required the creation and maintenance of one of the most sophisticated pre-modern bureaucracies ever created. The costly upkeep of its large (and continually shifting) imperial borders, alongside an intellectual conviction of innate political supremacy and geographical centrality, meant that, unlike late medieval Europe, China had little interest in the world beyond itself. The Buddhist and Confucian heritage that shaped Chinese beliefs was also profoundly different from that of the Christian and Muslim religions of the book that developed in the West after the collapse of the Graeco-Roman world. As universal religions, both Christianity and Islam believed they had a divine responsibility to spread their religion across the entire earth, a concept that was completely alien to both Buddhism and Confucianism.10

  The result was a tradition of mapmaking which focused on the establishment of boundaries and the practical maintenance of empire, concerns pursued by bureaucratic elites much earlier than in the religious societies of the West. It did not try to project an imaginative geography beyond its borders that could be claimed on behalf of a particular religion or ideology, nor did it aim to encourage or enable long-distance travel and maritime expansion beyond the Indian Ocean (by the 1430s the Ming dynasty had permanently recalled its fleets from wider exploration). Where China led, Korea followed. Wor
king as a client state of imperial China for much of its early history stretching back to c. 100 BC, Korea’s mapmakers were similarly concerned to provide the kingdom’s elite with practical maps for the administration of political rule. The Kangnido map did this from a very particular perspective. It was made first and foremost according to the Korean peninsula’s distinctive physical geography, and to relations with its larger and infinitely more powerful neighbour.

  • • •

  Most maps offer some interplay between image and text, and the Kangnido map is no exception. Across its bottom is an extensive legend transcribed in forty-eight columns, written by :

  The world is very wide. We do not know how many tens of millions of li there are from China in the centre to the four seas at the outer limits, but in compressing and mapping it on a folio sheet several feet in size, it is indeed difficult to achieve precision; that is why [the results of] the mapmakers have generally been either too diffuse or too abbreviated. But the Shengjiao guangbei tu [Map of the vast reach of (civilization’s) resounding teaching] of Li Zemin of Wumen is both detailed and comprehensive, while for the succession of emperors and kings and of countries and capitals across time, the Hunyi jiangli tu [Map of integrated regions and terrains] by the Tiantai monk Qingjun is thorough and complete. In the fourth year of the Jianwen era [1402], Left Minister Kim [Sahyong] of Sangju and Right Minister Yi [Mu] of Tanyang, during moments of rest from their governing duties, made a comparative study of these maps and ordered Yi Hoe, an orderly, to carefully collate them and then combine them into a single map. Insofar as the area east of the Liao River and our own country’s territory were concerned, Zemin’s maps had many gaps and omissions, so Yi Hoe supplemented and expanded the map of our country and added a map of Japan, making it a new map entirely, nicely organised and well worth admiration. One can indeed know the world without going out of his door! By looking at maps one can know terrestrial distances and get help in the work of government. The care and concern expended on this map by our two gentlemen can be grasped just by the greatness of its scale and dimension.11

  ’s preface seems to share similarities with approach to the Entertainment: there is general uncertainty about the size and shape of the known world; to make a more comprehensive map, it is necessary to borrow from an established geographical tradition (in case both Greek and Islamic, for the Chinese); political and administrative patronage involving a team of experts is crucial to the endeavour; and the result inspires wonder and pleasure.

  The preface raises two elements, both related, that provide a way to understand the map. The first is the political context of the map’s creation, and the second the influence of Chinese mapmaking. Kim Sahyong (1341–1407) and Yi Mu (d. 1409) were part of the dynasty’s cadre of Neo-Confucian advisers. Both men were involved in land surveys carried out on Korea’s northern frontier in 1402, just months before the Kangnido map was made, and both travelled to China on diplomatic business; Kim’s trip in 1399 possibly enabled him to obtain the Chinese maps mentioned by . The Kangnido map is dated 1402 by not in relation to the foundation of the dynasty, but to the neighbouring Chinese Jianwen period of rule. The Jianwen emperor, Zhu Yunwen (r. 1398–1402) was the second ruler of the Ming dynasty and the grandson of its founder, the Hongwu emperor Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368–98). The Buddhist monk and mapmaker Qingjun was a close adviser to the Hongwu emperor and oversaw the rituals performed in Nanjing in 1372 to legitimize the new regime. A fifteenth-century reproduction of Qingjun’s Hunyi jiangli tu shows that it provided both a geographical and historical description of the early Chinese dynasties, to which, as notes, Yi Hoe ‘supplemented and expanded’ Korea to the east, and added the Arabian peninsula, Africa and Europe to the west.12 Hoe (1354–1409) was a senior civil servant in the regime. He survived temporary exile at the orders of King T’aejong and by 1402 was back in the capital, making a map of the dynasty, and by the time he began work on the Kangnido map he was Legal Secretary () in the new government (possibly as a result of his cartographic expertise).13

  Fig. 8 Copy of Qingjun’s map of China, from a mid-fifteenth-century commonplace book by Ye Sheng.

  The Hongwu emperor’s successor Zhu Yunwen was overthrown by his uncle Zhu Di, the prince of Yan, who installed himself as the Yongle emperor after two years of bloody civil war.14 By the time the Kangnido map was completed, Zhu Yunwen was already dead. Despite his explicit references to the Ming rather than the dynasty, refers to the most militarily sensitive area in recent disputes between the two kingdoms when he points out the need to rectify the limitation of the Chinese mapmaker Li Zemin’s mapping of Korea ‘east of the Liao River’. His only other geographical observation is that the Kangnido adds a new map of Korea’s other powerful and historically troublesome neighbour, Japan. The map clearly seeks to position the new Korean kingdom in the changing political world of early fifteenth-century East Asia.

  Whatever the vicissitudes of regional dynastic politics between China and Korea evoked by preface, his admiration for the Chinese mapmaking which he cites as underpinning the map’s creation is unquestionable. Both Li Zemin and Qingjun were making maps in the first half of the fourteenth century, but China’s influence on Korean politics and geography goes back much further. Ever since Korea’s emergence as an independent kingdom by the beginning of the fourth century BC, both its rulers and its scholars had looked to its larger and more powerful neighbour’s civilization for inspiration in matters of statecraft, science and culture. This was never a purely passive relationship. Korea continued to assert its political independence from China while appropriating its cultural achievements wherever they seemed expedient.

  Objects which can be described as maps can be found in China as early as the fourth century BC. But as in the case of any pre-modern society that produces manuscript maps across a large period of time and space, to speak of a Chinese cartographic ‘tradition’ over several millennia is problematic, even anachronistic. The first problem is one of surviving sources. Prior to the tenth century relatively few maps survive, making claims about the ‘development’ of Chinese mapmaking almost meaningless. Where written records have survived but maps have disappeared, it is difficult to speculate on what particular maps might have looked like. Too much interpretation rests on too few maps. Even those that have survived are plagued with the usual problems associated with the circulation and transmission of handmade maps, from unreliable copying and scholarly distribution to political injunctions against their wider dissemination.

  Even more problematic is establishing just what is meant by a ‘map’. As in Greek, Christian and Islamic societies, the Chinese term for ‘map’ is just as imprecise, and covers a range of different meanings and artefacts. In pre-modern Chinese, tu generally designates what in the West would be regarded as a map or a plan, although it can also refer to a wide variety of pictures, diagrams, charts and tables created in a range of different media (wood, stone, brass, silk and paper). Tu could be both word and image, and often combined graphic visual representations with written, textual descriptions (including poetry) which were seen as complementing each other. As one twelfth-century scholar put it, ‘images (tu) are the warp threads and the written words (shu) are the weft . . . To see the writing without the image is like hearing a voice without seeing the form; to see the image without the writing is like seeing a person but not hearing his words.’15 The emotive resonances of the interplay here between tu and shu are largely absent from Western definitions of a map. As a verb tu describes planning, anticipating or thinking. It was sometimes even directly translated as ‘difficulty in planning’, which rather succinctly captures the practice of many early mapping activities, in this case both within and beyond China.16

  Unlike the pinax of the early Greeks, the Chinese tu is a dynamic act rather than a physical medium, as recent Sinologists have argued by defining it as a ‘template for action’.17 And in contrast to the Greek periodos , or ‘circuit of the earth�
�, it is not intimately related to prevailing cosmographical beliefs. Here again the Chinese developed a different approach from that of the Greeks. In early Chinese mythology there is no divine will authorizing the act of creation. With little religiously or politically authorized cosmogony (unlike the Judaeo-Christian and Islamic traditions), the Chinese developed an extraordinarily diverse range of beliefs about the origins of the earth and its inhabitants. Within this diversity, three schools of cosmological thought were particularly influential.

  The most archaic was the Kai t’ien theory. This believed that the circular dome of the heavens sat like a bamboo hat on top of the earth. The earth was square like a chessboard, sloping down towards its four corners to form the rim of an encircling ocean. A more popular system was the huntian, or enveloping heaven theory, which emerged in the fourth century BC. It argued that the heavens encircle the earth, which lies at their centre (and it is intriguing that this idea developed at the same time as Greek theories of concentric celestial cosmography). One proponent of the huntian theory, Zhang Heng (AD 78–139) claimed that the ‘heavens are like a hen’s egg and as round as a crossbow bullet; the earth is like the yolk of the egg, and lies alone in the centre’.18 The most radical belief was the more allusive xuan ye shuo, or infinite empty space theory: ‘The heavens were empty and devoid of substance,’ according to one later Han dynasty writer, and the ‘sun, the moon and the company of stars float freely in the empty space, moving or standing still’.19