Great Wall in 50 Objects

by William Lindesay

  Bases were ranked in order of scale – from the smallest, guancheng, through pucheng, suocheng and weicheng, to the largest, zhencheng, of which there are nine. From east to west, these zhencheng, or ‘commandery towns’, are Lioadong, Jizhen, Xuanfu, Datong, Taiyuan, Yansui, Ningxia, Guyuan and Gansu. While there are no marked regional boundaries between adjacent commanderies, there are, for example, labels indicating ‘Jizhen bian xi jie Xuanfuzhen bian dong jie’, or ‘The western boundary of Jizhen meets the eastern boundary of Xuanfu’.

  Frustratingly, while the ultimate purpose of all the work was to defend the Emperor in Beijing, the map area around the imperial city has been completely obliterated – there is simply a black void on the North China Plain. To the north, the picture resumes, with Xu Lun noting the distances in li from one base to another: ‘Miyun to Shishaying, 100 li . . . Shishaying to Gubeikou, 150 li’ and so on.

  DESCRIPTION: Jiubian Tu, or ‘Map of the Nine Border Regions’, composed of twelve vertical panels of painted silk, designed to form a screen: pieced together, the map measures 2.08 by 5.67 metres

  SIGNIFICANCE: The oldest extant Great Wall map

  ORIGIN: Drawn by Xu Lun in 1534, painted circa 1538; the original is lost, and 'amended' copies from the Qing are extant; this example dates from 1625

  LOCATION: Liaoning Provincial Museum, Shenyang

  If we use these rough measurements to work out the map’s scale, we can estimate that it covers about 600 kilometres from top to bottom and 1500 kilometres from right to left. This makes the scale approximately 1:250 000, meaning that one metre of the map represents 250 kilometres of territory, and each of the map’s twelve panels covers a band of land about 125 kilometres in width.

  Xu Lun’s map is clearly based on years of in-depth personal experience, but surely also benefited from those in more distant commanderies and from other cartographic works. The result is an advanced sketch map which shows military bases, the Great Wall, troop deployments and distances. As such, it’s the first map to portray the Great Wall as a coherent defence system.

  Venturing outside the Wall, we find snippets of military intelligence, especially concerning the locations of enemy encampments. Altan Khan’s people, persistent adversaries, are shown ‘nesting’ north of Datong in their chaoxue, or ‘lairs’, while those nomadic tribes which have acknowledged the superiority of Ming China are referred to less derogatorily. They live in jimi weisuo, or ‘won-over camps’.

  Xu Lun’s biography appears in Mingshi, or ‘The Official History of the Ming Dynasty’. The third son of a vice-minister of war, he was born in 1487 in Lingbo, Henan Province. In 1526 he passed the jinshi, or highest-level imperial examinations, which permitted him to enter the Board of War at the age of thirty-nine. After producing his map, he served as military regional commander of the Xuanfu, Datong and Yansui commanderies. These were strung out along the soft underbelly of the Ming frontier. In 1558, at the remarkable age of sixty-eight, Xu Lun reached his pinnacle, becoming Minister of War. He died three years later – but that is not the end of the story as far as his map is concerned.

  Xu Lun’s original masterpiece had been placed before the Jiajing Emperor in 1537, meeting with his great approval. The Emperor ordered multiple copies to be reproduced and circulated to each of the nine commanderies. This bilingual Chinese–Manchu edition was discovered in 1949, during room clearance work at the Imperial Palace, Shenyang, home of the founding Manchu emperors of the Qing Dynasty (who ruled from there between 1625 and 1644). It is probably a descendent of the original Liaodong Commandery copy, which fell into the hands of the Manchus.

  Ironically, therefore, sometime between 1625 and 1644 Xu Lun’s map found itself in enemy territory. Captured, it was forced to speak Manchu, and it was turned upside down and used to show the Manchus the defence system they would have to overcome on the Ming’s north-eastern frontier.

  38.

  A Long Strip of Wall

  ‘Plans of the Jizhen Commandery’

  Before setting off on foot along the Ming Wall in 1987, I implemented every possible weight-saving trick, even down to territorial trimming. Unfolding my huge China map, I cut out a long corridor, approximately 200 kilometres wide, with the Wall’s battlement running down its spine. My adapted map, although dog-legged, was now better suited to my needs. Focused and featherweight, it measured only one-twentieth of its original size and weight.

  Anyone who has ever tackled a long-distance trail will appreciate the many advantages of a ‘strip map’. It’s an economic design, and it makes any long journey easier by dispensing with the need for large and unwieldy folding maps. These designs are descendants of much earlier milestones, such as the Peutinger itinerarium, a six-metre-plus series showing Roman roads circa AD 300, and a strip map showing a route for pilgrims from London via Rome to Jerusalem which prefaces Matthew Paris’ work Chronica Majora, authored and drawn in 1250. The Jizhen Tu, or ‘Plans of the Jizhen Commandery’, coming 330 years later, may be regarded among these earliest strip maps, but it is truly superlative for its length and detail. When fully unfolded, it presented a panoramic view of the Wall in the Jizhen Commandery that was approximately 125 metres in length.

  The folio was nearly lost on three occasions. Made around 1583, it was first rescued from an advancing army in 1621; then it was hidden away from marauding Red Guard hooligans at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in around 1967, only to be forgotten about. Its re-emergence began with the dispatch of a large parcel from Jize County, in southern Hebei Province, addressed to the National Museum of China, Beijing. It had been packaged by Kang Junxiang of Macheng village, who explained in a note that he was a fourteenth-generation descendent of Kang Yingquan, a Ming scholar official of the early 1600s, who was responsible for military ordnance in Shandong and troop deployments on the Liaodong coast. In the course of those duties, in 1621 Kang was in Liaoyang just as the commandery seat was about to be attacked by Nurhachi (1559–1626), the unifier of the Jurchens as the Manchus, and the founder of the Qing in 1619. Fearing the consequences of the strategic map falling into enemy hands, Kang Yingquan took it home for safekeeping, and there it stayed as a family heirloom until the mid-1960s.

  The villager explained that, at that time, his mother had hidden the folio in a willow basket, along other family treasures, such as ancient letters praising their ancestor’s meritorious achievements, and the family genealogy. She was saving them from the rampaging red guards, who were campaigning to ‘Smash the Four Olds’, one of the rebellious anti-establishment whirlwinds unleashed by Chairman Mao Zedong on the nation’s culture, customs, habits and ideas.

  The contents of the package were studied in detail by Yang Wenhe, a senior research fellow at the museum. It contained a thick wad of pages – some loose, some attached, some rotted by dampness, some stuck together, others dried to dust – as well as scores of loose labels that had once been attached to the sheets. Describing it as a ‘ragged portfolio’ and yet as an ‘extraordinary acquisition’, Yang set to work making sense of the plans. Following painstaking repairs, the folio was exhibited in 2006 at a joint exhibition in Sydney, Australia, curated by the National Museum of China and the Powerhouse Museum.

  DESCRIPTION: ‘Jizhen Changcheng Tu’, or ‘Plans of the Jizhen Commandery’; a painted and stamped accordion-form folio of 670 illustrated sheets, each measuring 33 x 19 cm

  SIGNIFICANCE: Detailed, comprehensive and complete field view of Jizhen defences, using innovative cartographic design layout of strip mapping and diagrammatic simplification

  ORIGIN: Produced c. 1580s

  LOCATION: National Museum of China, Beijing (not on public exhibition)

  I obtained photographs of a number of consecutive sheets from the two different parts of the fragile folio, photocopied them, enlarged them and spliced them together. It was immediately clear that one of the plan types was not a map in the conventional sense, but a skyline view. The other type, again not a map as such, looked more like a diagram to
which labels bearing text were affixed.

  The skyline view plans employed two artistic approaches. Looking at the dark-grey mountain slopes, we see thick brushstrokes: these parts of the plan were painted in ink wash. Along the ridge we see the outer face of the battlements, built in ‘tiger skin’ style with roughly quarried rocks bound with mortar and topped with battlements, and towers positioned at various intervals. Visually, the towers are identical – tall and thin, and each topped by a pufang sentry post with a small flag – and were produced by a stamping technique. They were then coloured – bluish-grey if completed, or red if planned.

  This part of the plan presents the actual view one would have seen if approaching the Wall from the outside. Facing it, we can clearly see that we are looking ‘into the Walled Empire’; labels tell us that ‘the distance to the next tower in the west is fifty-four zhang [178 metres]’ and so on. The plan’s unorthodox orientation immediately arouses one’s curiosity. Why was the age-old convention of having north at the top of the map not observed by the plan’s maker?

  The reason surely related to the plan’s users and the orientation of their workplace. Generals stationed ‘inside’ the Wall worked in offices that faced south. Compliant with cosmological practice, the rooms and furniture within them would also face south. A general seated at his desk and using this plan therefore only has to open the plan and it’s oriented correctly. Additionally, the plans show the defences as the enemy might approach them. Using these plans, operators, administrators and inspectors could see the defences just as their enemies did.

  While the skyline view plan features commonly used strip map simplification techniques, such as a relaxation of cardinal direction and scale, the second style of plans in the folio further simplifies the appearance of the defences. Towers are arranged equidistantly from one another. Large labels are attached above each tower noting the deployment of military personnel and any temporary assignments. This part of the plan functions as a noticeboard, recording who is on duty and where.

  Both plan types employ presentation techniques used by virtually every city that has a subway system. Ever since Richard Beck’s iconic London Underground Map of 1931, dubbed ‘The Diagram’, subway operators worldwide have abided by ‘London Rules’ in straightening out bends, showing stations as equidistantly apart and removing surrounding clutter, usually preferring a plain white background. The Jizhen plan did the same, 350 years earlier. Further, its maker decided against using a scroll display method – a long piece of paper between two wooden rollers – which was the traditional way to present large, long documents. Instead, he folded the pages like an accordion. Users would turn the folios to progress along the fortifications.

  While the large Huayi Tu (Object 13) was made for imperial use, and the Jiubian Tu (Object 37) for ministerial hall or war rooms, this long strip map, cleverly conceived and compactly packaged, was designed for those working in the border defence’s Jizhen Commandery.

  Now, one can only wait in hope for a fourth rescue of the plans, taking them from the oblivion of museum storage and onto the web. Digital scanning would enable anyone worldwide to make a fascinating online tour of the Jizhen Commandery’s circuits as they were in 1583, showcasing the final stages in the development of the Great Wall border defences.

  39.

  Globalisation

  Cornelis de Jode’s ‘new’ world map

  I think my search for this object began subconsciously during my first trip to the United States, back in 1980, soon after I purchased a beautiful illuminated globe from National Geographic’s headquarters in Washington D.C. When I switched it on, I saw that it showed the Great Wall. A future quest lay in store: to discover the Great Wall’s debut on a map of the entire world.

  Superficially, the place where I’d likely find the answer seemed obvious. Surely the journey would lead me to a map of the world of Chinese origin: not only is that where the Wall is, but it’s also where the materials for making maps were invented: paper, the compass and printing.

  Twenty-five years later, however, I would refined my search. I was still looking for the earliest world map to feature a Great Wall, but it had to show the world as we know it today. This narrowed the search area to Europe, the continent which excelled in geographical learning during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries – the Age of Discovery. In the early sixteenth century, ‘world’ maps were based partly on superficial knowledge and largely on speculation and imagination – and they didn’t show any Great Wall. Later sixteenth-century world maps were based mainly on navigation and detailed knowledge.

  Research in the 1990s led me to elucidate the importance of Abraham Ortelius’ Theatre of the World, the world’s first internationally distributed atlas, and its significant inclusion in 1584 of a China map, showing the Wall (see Object 1). This discovery led me towards an answer to the global Great Wall question. It seemed logical that, soon after 1584, a designer of a world map, using the latest available country maps as his sources, might consider the Great Wall worthy of inclusion on account of its purported, vast length: 400 leagues (which equalled 1200 English miles, according to a Latin annotation on Ortelius’ map).

  In 2003, during the SARS epidemic, circumstances of self-confinement in our Beijing apartment created the perfect opportunity for a diversional desk project. I went online and spent several hundred pounds on the most expensive contemporary book that I’ve ever purchased: The Mapping of the World: Early Printed World Maps, 1472–1700 by Rodney Shirley.

  I embarked on searches in converging directions, from older to newer maps, and from newer to older. The search parties met in the Netherlands, above an extraordinary map in the collection of Utrecht University Library. Revealing itself under my magnifying glass, there in the grey murk, was a Wall in China. The map was thought to date to 1590. Older maps never showed the Wall, while younger ones almost always did. The Wall was now firmly on the map, in all senses of the phrase.

  The astonishing accomplishment of this map – titled Nova Totius Orbis Descriptio, or ‘A New Description of the Entire World’ – by Cornelis de Jode of Antwerp can be understood if we declutter it a little. Let’s remove the zephyrs from the margins, the medallions of illustrious explorers and the galleons they sailed, and the Latin title board, and then let’s add some colour. If we were to show the result to citizens around the world today, I’m confident that people from Beijing to Paris, from Pretoria to Panama, would describe it as a world map. Not an ancient world map, but a world map.

  This map was printed four and a quarter centuries ago, in about 1590, or the nineteenth year of the Wanli Emperor’s reign. I provide this date in the Gregorian and the Chinese calendars because we are talking about a threshold in West–East relations, a time when, in certain areas of knowledge, the tables are being turned. After being a world leader in virtually every discipline, China is standing still, while the West is advancing fast.

  The geographical accuracy of Cornelis de Jode’s world map is emphasised when we compare it to those being produced in China and the rest of Asia at that time. Showing any Chinese, Japanese or Korean ‘world map’ from the sixteenth or seventeenth century to a modern audience would, I’m confident, lead to widespread bewilderment. These so-called ‘maps of the world’ were merely maps of those lands, with little beyond. They showed ‘the world’ as a rounded landmass – a Pangea-type supercontinent – within a round border, at the centre of which lay the Middle Kingdom. Cornelis de Jode’s map is so good that few people today, if given a pencil and large sheet, could draw such a world that they know so accurately. While the former lacks almost everywhere, the latter can only be bettered by the addition of Australia and New Zealand.

  Rather cleverly, the design of Nova Totius Orbis Descriptio conveys the fact that although it is drawn on flat paper, the world it depicts is round, a true globe. For one thing, it features overlapping landmasses, offering two possible routes between Europe and China, one to the east, one to the west. Secondly, it shows a do
tted line across the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans – the route of Sir Francis Drake’s circumnavigation in 1577–1580. Thirdly, if we focus on the Great Wall, we see a long section at the far eastern edge of the map, and two shorter sections at the far western edge. This map is an advanced view of the world, the product of a multinational European cartographic community that was motivated to pioneer for profits. The Chinese map-making system, on the other hand, remained shackled to the political idea of Sinocentrism.

  DESCRIPTION: Novo Totius Orbis Descripto, or ‘A New Description of the Entire World’, a copper-plate printed world map measuring 48 x 81 cm

  SIGNIFICANCE: The earliest world map that looks like the world to show the Great Wall

  ORIGIN: Possibly Antwerp; based on a mid-16th century map by Venetian cartographer Giacomo Gastaldi, with printing plate amendments made c. 1590A.D. by Cornelius de Jode in order to show the latest maritime discoveries

  LOCATION: Utrecht University Library rare maps collection, Netherlands

  Our world map of the Wall is but part of a great European cartographic advance. For the first time in history people are seeing what the real world looks like, and what wonders it contains. Awareness of the Great Wall’s existence in China was no longer limited to a small band of Jesuits and their society in Rome. Initially, atlases that displayed the Wall were so expensive that they would only be purchased by the powerful and wealthy. The Wall’s existence – if it was noticed at all – was a privileged view only for those living in palaces, castles or mansions, or those studying in Europe’s first universities.

  During the seventeenth century, the widespread inclusion of the Great Wall on European maps certainly increased people’s awareness of it, yet its significance seems to have gone unappreciated. I first realised this when I began to travel widely and see the world’s other great ancient constructions. Naturally, I compared how they measured up to the Great Wall in size, antiquity, materials, location, function, symbolism, beauty, and of course the human effort required to build them. During these ponderings, I concluded that the inclusion of the Great Wall on world maps was a succinct statement of its greatness, as it highlighted an attribute that other leading wonders – such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, Petra, the Colosseum, the Taj Mahal or Machu Picchu – didn’t have: a geography. It was cartographer Cornelis de Jode who had first depicted this for the world to see. It seems, however, that he gained neither recognition nor profit for his vision.