A History of the World in 12 Maps

by Jerry Brotton

  Rather than celebrating its use of scale and incorporating new geographical data, the ‘Yu ji tu’ conflates mythical geography with contemporary place – and for a very specific reason. For more than 100 years the Song dynasty had attempted to centralize military and administrative authority across the borders of classical China. Despite its political difficulties, or perhaps as a result of them, the Song encouraged a period of extraordinary cultural and economic reform, issuing one of the first examples of printed money, massively expanding its scholar-official class (the shidafu), and instituting one of the most innovative periods of woodblock and movable type printing since its invention in China at the end of the seventh century.42 But by the early twelfth century the dynasty’s northern territories were under threat by the Jurchen Jin (a confederacy of Tungusic tribes from northern Manchuria). In 1127 the Song capital of Kaifeng on the southern banks of the Yellow River fell to the Jin, and the Song retreated south of the Yangtze to their new capital of Hangzhou. In 1141 they signed a peace treaty with the Jin ceding nearly half their territory, and drawing a boundary line between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. For the rest of the twelfth century until the dynasty’s collapse in 1279, Song rulers and their shidafu dreamt of reunification with the lost northern territories and the recreation of classical imperial China.43

  It never happened, but the ‘Yu ji tu’ offers just such a unity, as much through what it does not show (or say) as through what it does. It is a map without boundaries, on which there is no mention of the Jurchen Jin territories. Instead, the mythical geography of the ‘Yu Gong’ is conflated with the ideal geography of the Song dynasty, before the incursions of the Jurchen Jin. The Song try to represent themselves as not only unified, but the natural heirs of the original idea of a unified China, the nine provinces created by Yu the Great to which foreign rulers paid tribute. That political reality was so far removed from the idealized and nostalgic space depicted on the map only magnifies its apparent power to convince the Song audience of the possibility of such unification.

  The ‘Yu ji tu’ and the ‘Hua yi tu’ represented two strands of Chinese imperial mapmaking that told the same story. The ‘Yu ji tu’ projected an enduring world free of contemporary political divisions, defined by the mythical unity of the nine provinces described by Yu. The ‘Hua yi tu’ drew on the same ideal, defining the empire as the ‘Middle Kingdom’, or Zhongguo, a reference to the northern Chinese provinces which lie at its centre, a reiteration of centralized power and authority in relation to foreign lands that was desperately needed during the turbulent period of the Southern Song. To Western eyes, both maps exhibit glaring topographical ‘inaccuracies’, but these were irrelevant to the projection of an ideal, imperial landscape based on classical texts like ‘Yu Gong’.44

  Poetry describing maps either side of the traumatic division of the Song also captures their power at first to acknowledge, and then lament the loss of territory. Writing more than 100 years earlier, the ninth-century Tang poet Cao Song describes ‘Examining “The Map of Chinese and Non-Chinese Territories”’:

  With a touch of the brush the earth can be shrunk;

  Unrolling the map I encounter peace.

  The Chinese occupy a prominent position;

  Under what constellation do we find the border areas!45

  On this occasion, the almost meditative act of unrolling the map and seeing a unified Chinese dynasty at its centre evokes emotions of security and assurance. Later Southern Song poets used a similar conceit, but with very different emotions. Writing in the late twelfth century, the celebrated Lu You (1125–1210) lamented:

  I have been around for seventy years, but my heart has remained as it was in the beginning,

  Unintentionally I spread the map, and tears come gushing forth.46

  The map is now an emotive sign of loss and grief, and perhaps a ‘template for action’, a call to unite what has been lost.

  Fig. 12 The General Survey Map of China and Non-Chinese Territories from the Past to the Present, c. 1130.

  The maps referred to by the Song poets include not just the stone ‘Hua yi tu’, but also other contemporary woodblock printed examples, such as ‘The General Survey Map of China and Non-Chinese Territories from the Past to the Present’ (c. 1130), one of the earliest surviving Chinese printed maps. The growth of the Song civil service in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries saw candidates for its examinations rise to as many as 400,000, and part of their preparation involved an understanding of the practical and administrative uses of maps. Commercial printers quickly capitalized on this new market, producing maps like the ‘General Survey’. It is a sign of the map’s popularity, and how far it was disseminated among the elite, that it went through up to six different editions, all of which were subject to updates and revisions by a variety of printers. The map’s political function can be gleaned from some of its written legends, which describe ‘administrative subdivisions past and present’, ‘the northern barbarians’, and even ‘the Great Wall’, shown running across the top of the map. But as these descriptions indicate, this was a view of the empire rooted as much in the past as the present. Like the stone stelae, these printed maps created a vision of empire evoked through the rivers and mountains of an immutable China. Although used by scholars and officials in the everyday administration of empire, they also contained a set of deeply held beliefs about its enduring space.

  • • •

  To read the Kangnido map through this diffuse and discontinuous history of Chinese mapmaking is fraught with difficulties. Nevertheless, the map’s textual references make it possible to trace certain continuities with Chinese methods: its reproduction of places, and reliance on a mythic, textual geography. But it is also understandably full of specifically Korean preoccupations. Korea was unique in the pre-modern world for using a unit of monetary exchange in the shape of the country’s peninsula. In 1101 a proclamation announced the circulation of a silver vase () that ‘resembled the territorial outline of this country’.47 In such a geographically distinct region, shaped by mountainous terrain and an almost obsessive concern with its larger and more militarily powerful neighbours China and Japan, a distinctive tradition of mapmaking emerged that combined mythical spirituality with political security. In Korean, the word for ‘map’ is chido, meaning ‘earth chart’ or ‘land picture’, and the first written references to them date back to the early seventh century AD. Although none of these early maps survives, virtually all remaining references to them indicate that, like many of the Chinese maps already discussed, they were developed for administrative and imperial uses. In 628 the Korean kingdom presented a ‘Map of the Infeudated Region’ (since lost) to the Chinese Tang court, a classic example of a subject state using maps to pay tribute to its imperial superior.48

  Equally important to Korean mapmaking was the age-old belief in geomancy, or p’ungsu (‘wind and rain’, better known in Chinese as feng shui), also referred to as ‘shapes-and-forces’. Geomancy involved siting graves, dwellings, monasteries and even cities in auspicious places where they could harmonize with the natural flow of the earth’s energy (or ch’i), channelled through features such as mountains and rivers. As with the Chinese use of the nonary square, geomancy involved a radically different perception of physical space from that in Judaeo-Christian tradition. Predating Buddhist beliefs, geomancy regarded the landscape rather like the human body, with its practitioners acting as ‘earth physicians’, taking the land’s pulse and tracing its arteries through particularly important mountains and rivers. Describing geomancy in Chinese landscape painting, the art critic Roger Goepper writes that ‘every section of nature in a particular countryside is, so to speak, a closed world in and of itself, a largely isolated microcosm in a greater fabric with which it is linked not so much spatially as by the common universal force of ch’i’.49

  In the distinctively shaped peninsula of Korea, where mountain ridges make up 70 per cent
of the land’s surface, geomantic mapping (, or ‘shapes-and-forces’) was even more prevalent than in China.50 Geomancers regarded propitious areas for habitation as lying between the cosmically charged mountains of Paektu in the north and Chiri in the south, with cosmic power decreasing the further one travelled away from its mountainous origins. In mythology, Mount Paektu, a volcanic mountain in the peninsula’s north-eastern region, represented both the origins of the Korean people, and the country’s natural energy. Its importance was stressed by a typical geomantic description of the peninsula written in 1402 by the Korean official Yi . ‘The central highland stretches down [from Mount Paetku] from which point neither the earth features nor the map scroll go any farther south, into the sea; rather, the pure and pristine matter here mingles and accumulates, which is why the mountains are so high and steep.’ For Yi , the description of physical geography is a representation of spiritual shapes and forces. ‘Primal matter here flows and there solidifies,’ he continues, ‘and the mountains and rivers form their separate zones.’51 The founder of the dynasty, T’aejo (Wang , r. 935–43), used similar geomantic principles as a basis of political rule, advising his son that ‘the geographic harmony to the south is rugged and disharmonious, and it is easy for the people of that region also to lack a harmonious spirit’, warning that if such people ‘participate in the management of national affairs, they might cause disturbances and imperil the throne. So, beware.’52 Although the Neo-Confucian approach of the dynasty was circumspect about what they regarded as the Buddhist (and specifically Zen) conventions of geomantic siting associated with the previous dynasty, such beliefs still persisted (particularly at a local level), albeit in diminished form. The Office of Astronomy and Geomancy used such beliefs when siting and building the new capital of Hanyang.53

  None of these early geomantic maps has survived, but a copy of a 1463 official map of Korea (known as the Tongguk chido), made by (1390–1475), a known shapes-and-forces specialist, reflects prevailing geomantic concerns. The entire map is characterized by the arterial network of rivers (in blue) and mountains (in green), all of which can be traced directly back to Mount Paektu, the ultimate source of cosmic energy. Each province is given its own colour, and significant towns are marked with circles, enabling viewers to assess their propitious geomantic siting in relation to the surrounding rivers and mountains. But as well as its geomantic influence, the map also shows the Korean preoccupation with national security. Despite extensive geographical knowledge of Korea’s borders, this map grossly compresses the country’s northern frontier, despite the region’s geomantic importance as the location of Mount Paektu. In bringing together Korean mapmakers’ distinctive preoccupations with geomancy and political security, the map’s northern borders appear to have been deliberately distorted in case it fell into the hands of northern invaders like the Chinese or the Jurchen (which, given the diplomatic circulation of maps during this period, was a distinct possibility).54

  The Kangnido map shows a remarkable fusion of these disparate cartographic elements; some diminished, others heightened. Its Chinese sources, the mid-fourteenth-century maps of Qingjun and Li Zemin, were the products of a textual and historical tradition of mapping that unified the two Song conventions represented by the ‘Yu ji tu’ and ‘Hua yi tu’. But the Kangnido is intriguingly selective about which elements it borrows from this kind of map. It forgoes using a scaled grid, but it does depict ‘foreign lands’, rather than just writing about them in textual legends. With no investment in the Chinese tradition of reclaiming empire through its mythical foundations in texts like the ‘Yu Gong’, the Kangnido map is free to represent the world beyond China’s borders as an act of curiosity, rather than anxiety. Nevertheless, its composition clearly accepts the cultural and political importance of China, placed right at its centre; and despite its lack of a grid, the map is rectangular, in an oblique acknowledgement of the nonary principles of Chinese cosmography.

  Of all its Chinese influences, the map’s northern orientation is perhaps the most striking. From ancient times, burial sites in Korea were oriented towards the east, a principle also adopted by the Mongolian and Turkic peoples to the north. But in archaic Chinese scriptural tradition, as we saw in Chapter 2, the king or emperor faced south from an elevated position above his subjects, who faced north and looked ‘up’ at the emperor, who always gazed ‘down’ on his subjects. As we have seen, the Chinese word for ‘back’ (in the anatomical sense) is synonymous with the word for north, both phonetically and graphically, because the emperor’s back is always turned to the north. ‘Recite’ is also associated phonetically and graphically with the north, as students reciting a classical text must turn their ‘backs’ to the teacher, so they cannot see texts displayed in the classroom. In phraseology involving orientation, ‘left’ will indicate east and ‘right’ will indicate west, according to the perspective of the emperor. Even the Chinese compass was oriented southwards. It is referred to as a ‘south pointer’ (zhinan), because in conventional orientation the user will face south – unless the emperor is present – since that is the direction of warm winds and sun enabling crops to ripen, a factor which also influenced the geomantic siting of Chinese homes and graves.55

  Despite the Korean obsession with geomancy, its influence on the map’s depiction of Korea is surprisingly limited. Nowhere is more important to Koreans than Mount Paektu, but on the Kangnido map Paektu is hardly even highlighted, and, when compared to a modern map, is placed too far to the south-east. The peninsula’s main mountain ranges are only faintly marked with jagged lines, as is the ‘Baekdudaegan’, the main range running down the spine of the kingdom’s east coast, with its main arteries running westwards towards the major cities of Songdo and Hanyang. The rivers are accurately portrayed, running like veins across the country’s surface. But compared to geomantic descriptions like Yi , the shapes-and-forcess tradition appears to be dramatically diminished within the map’s broader international horizons.

  clearly understood the sensitivity of maps embracing a wider political perspective, and his involvement in a diplomatic mission in 1396–7 sheds new light on his motivation for creating the Kangnido map in a new era of Sino-Korean relations. Following the coup of 1389, the regime was anxious to retain its long-standing diplomatic relationship of sadae (or ‘serving the great’) with its Ming neighbour. Before he assumed the throne in 1392, Yi dispatched letters to the Hongwu emperor Zhu Yuanzhang, justifying his actions and even consulting the Ming court on his kingdom’s new name (the Chinese preferred because of its associations with the ancient Korean kingdom of Old ). But in 1396, in an attempt to ensure Korea’s subjection, the Ming court condemned correspondence as ‘flippant and disrespectful’, and detained its visiting envoys.56 This inspired a diplomatic crisis known as the dispute, which revolved around dynastic and textual definitions of empire and territory.

  The political geography of Zhu Yuanzhang’s official account of the perceived affront can almost be seen as a justification for the subsequent creation of the Kangnido map:

  Now is a country with a king [and] by his disposition he has sought to have close relations with us and rules accordingly, but the foolish and treacherous [envoys] do as they please and the document they brought requested seals and imperial mandates, which cannot be given lightly. is hemmed in by mountains and blocked by the sea, it has been fashioned by heaven and earth to be the land of the eastern Yi [barbarian] people where customs are different. If I bestow the official seals and mandates and order these here envoys be vassals, then in the eyes of the ghosts and spirits would I not be being exceedingly avaricious? Compared to sages of antiquity, I would certainly not have shown a measure of restraint.57

  The rhetoric of withholding favour is classic diplomacy, but the Ming justification is based on Neo-Confucian principles of empire. is regarded as a ‘barbarian’ kingdom across the mountains and sea. Their ‘customs are different’, and arguably lay beyond the writ of the classical C
hinese provinces. Should they be included in the realm of Chinese imperial influence, asks the emperor, or would such a claim offend the pronouncements of the classical sages?

  The dispute was only resolved with the intervention of . During an eight-month stay in Nanjing, he developed an amicable personal relationship with the Hongwu emperor, negotiating the release of the detained envoys and re-establishing Ming– diplomatic relations. The two men even exchanged poems. Hongwu’s became known as (‘Poems of the Emperor’), and (‘Poems written at Royal Command’). The stylized and metaphorical language used in the poems records the intricate manoeuvrings between the two states as they came to accommodate each other’s political and territorial differences.

  The first of Hongwu’s poems focuses on the contested boundary of the Yalu River, the site of –Ming tensions in the 1380s, and the location of Yi pivotal military rebellion in 1389.

  Yalu River

  The clear waters of the Yalu mark the boundary of ancient fiefdoms,

  [each of us is] strong now tyranny is no more and deception has ceased, we enjoy these times of harmony.

  Refusing to accept fugitives gave a thousand years of dynastic stability,

  cultivating rites and propriety gave a hundred generations of merit.

  The Han expeditions can be clearly examined in the historical records,

  evidence of Liao campaigns merely await checking the traces left behind.

  Your King’s kind thoughts have reached to Heaven’s mind,

  the river’s strength is bereft of waves, yet it defends us and nobody is attacked.58

  Like the earlier Song maps, Hongwu’s poem applies the antique past to the present in asserting Ming dominance in the region. Classical Chinese texts defined the Yalu as the limit of China’s sphere of influence, but also took credit for bringing civilization to the peninsula, and by implication, to Korea. The more recent expulsion of the anti-Ming , and the refusal to harbour imperial ‘fugitives’, has brought harmony and stability to the region. But Hongwu also reminds of the ‘historical records’ of Chinese claims to the Liaodong peninsula, stretching back to the Han conquest of the region in 109 BC, and including the more recent conflict in the late 1380s. Ultimately, the Yalu is regarded as a permeable natural boundary between the two kingdoms, currently free of political ‘waves’.