Some Features of Chinese Cartography
From ancient times maps have served a variety of purposes in China. Many were designed as practical educational tools for scholar-officials, to guide, instruct and edify in times of both peace and war. They were also employed as a concrete means of asserting the emperor's territorial claims, whether local, empire-wide, or world-wide. Maps became symbolic tokens of exchange in China's domestic and foreign relations, and were even used to depict a perceived link between the realms of Heaven and Earth. Significantly, they also provided a means by which viewers could take "spiritual" journeys to distant lands--the cartographic equivalent of "travelling [through a landscape painting] while remaining at rest [woyou]".

Chinese mapmakers tended to be broadly gauged scholars and artists rather than narrow technicians. Until the late nineteenth century there were no professional or specialist cartographers as such in China. The scholars who created maps saw their productions as part of a larger intellectual and cultural enterprise--one that embraced not only science (especially astronomy and geography) but also history, philosophy, religion, art, literature, and religion (including divination). "History" was an especially prominent value in Chinese maps. Many cartographic collections, and even individual maps, bear titles indicating that they are concerned with the relationship between the "past and present" (gujin), or between successive dynastic periods (lidai). In other words, time and space remained closely connected in imperial China.

On the whole, explicitly religious maps seem to have been less popular in the Central Kingdom than in other parts of Asia, such as Burma, Korea, Japan and Tibet. We do, however, find Chinese cartographic works in both the Religious Daoist and Buddhist traditions. One such work, known as the Sihai Huayi zongtu (General Map of Chinese and Barbarian [Lands] within the Four Seas), purports to show the Buddhist continent of Jambudvipa (Chinese: Nanshanbuzhou), but replaces India as the principal geographical focus with China. The Chinese landscape, with its provinces, major rivers, mountains, and the Great Wall, is depicted in considerable detail, while India recedes to comparative insignificance in the southwest . A distinctive feature of this sort of map is its strong affinity with the Korean "wheel maps."

A number of Chinese maps indicate, sometimes explicitly, a concern with the principles of "siting" or "geomancy" (kanyu, fengshui, etc.). A central feature of this cosmological system is the belief that certain geographical forms and/or spaces will bring good fortune. Softly undulating rectangular shapes, for instance, are generally considered auspicious, as are lines of protective hills and mountains. Land configurations that envelope important spaces (in the fashion of the flanks of well-positioned gravesites), and waterways that nourish these areas, are also esteemed. As Philippe Foret and others have pointed out, Chinese mapmakers were not above adding such topographical features to their cartographic productions in order to depict (create) a more favorable geomantic environment. And where hills and mountains already existed but were separated by flat expanses of land that seemed to diminish their collective power, mapmakers might edit their rendering of the scene to give it greater geomantic strength. Sometimes places would simply be relocated in maps to give them a more favorable geomantic position, or altered in appearance for similar reasons.

Overall, Chinese cartographers treated large-scale space, including the world itself, as essentially flat. Although mathematical astronomers used ecliptic as well as equatorial coordinates in their celestial mapping, cartographers saw no need to project them on the earth. As a result, they "simply acted as of they were transferring points from a very large flat surface to a smaller one." At the same time, however, Chinese mapmakers often employed variable perspective and variable scale. Thus, for example, mountains might be drawn in elevation while rivers would appear in plane. Moreover, the size of objects relative to one another, as well as their distance from one another, were usually dictated not by their actual dimensions or by geometrical perspective but rather by the specific purposes for which the map was produced. Heavy annotation provided valuable information that might otherwise have been expressed by graphic images of scale.

Chinese maps often devote more space to the written text than to the actual image. Although the tendency for historians of cartography has been to denigrate heavily annotated maps in favor of more "representational" ones, there is no intrinsic reason for doing so. It was not, after all, lack of skill or "backwardness" that determined the nature of traditional Chinese cartography. In China, for cultural reasons, the written word, rather than visual images, remained the primary source of representational authority. In the pithy formulation of the well-known third century philosopher, Wang Bi, "Image is what brings out meaning; word is what clarifies image."

Cartographic texts in China commonly provided technical data concerning roads, waterways, landmarks, distances, and so forth. But they also supplied important cultural information. An excellent illustration can be found in a "geographic map [of China]" (Zhuili [Dili] tu), created by a scholar named Huang Chang in the 1190s--several decades after the fall of the Northern Song capital of Kaifeng to the invading Ruzhen people. The map was intended as an illustration for the future Song emperor (Ningzong, r. 1194-1224) of how much land had been lost to the northern barbarians, and as a reminder of the sovereign's responsibility to reunite the empire. The commentary to the map addresses the perennial problem of keeping China together, observing that "only one out of every ten [rulers] has been able to bring unity to all under Heaven." This discussion--which constantly emphasizes morality as the key to administrative success--is full of historical allusions to events such as the invasion of China by the Qidan people in the early tenth century and the rebellion of An Lushan in the mid-eighth century, as well as to the noteworthy unifying accomplishments of the sage-rulers Tang and Wen, who, despite having only modest territories to begin with (like the Southern Song), founded the great Shang and Zhou dynasties, respectively. The commentary naturally includes references to northern landmarks that had recently fallen under "barbarian" control--including the Yellow River, the Great Wall, and "a vast forest stretching several thousands of li."

The textual emphasis of traditional Chinese cartography did not in any way undermine the aesthetic appeal of maps. On the contrary, inscriptions often enhanced it. In contrast to the development of cartography in Europe, where manuscript maps became rather rare following the spread of copper engraving in the late fifteenth century, manuscript maps continued to be produced in great numbers in China. These documents, like landscape paintings, were tastefully shaded and often complemented by substantial amounts of calligraphy--sometimes even poetry. Printed maps could also be extraordinarily beautiful, with handsome, well-cut cartouches, and carefully colored natural features. Neither type of map could be considered true art, however, for both lacked the qualities of "life force" (qi) and "kinesthetic power" (shi) that indistinguished artistic creativity from mere craftsmanship.

Yet another distinctive feature of Chinese cartography is what Cordell Yee describes as its tendency toward introspection--a self-conscious preoccupation with concrete administrative concerns. Buildings and walls, for example, tend to loom large, quite literally, in many kinds of maps. Paradoxically, Chinese "introspection" included looking outward. That is, one of the emperor's traditional "domestic" concerns as the ruler of "all under Heaven" was the management of foreign peoples--whether on the periphery of his realm or beyond. These "barbarians" (yi, fan, etc.), although by definition not fully Chinese, were all at least theoretically the emperor's "subjects." Many of them periodically sent him local products, designated "tribute" (gong), and, in return, expected the Son of Heaven to protect and nurture them. From a Chinese standpoint, this highly refined system of "guest ritual" (binli), which allowed foreigners the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the Chinese emperor, was the logical extension of an ancient "feudal" structure of lord-vassal relationships. Although the tributary system underwent many permutations over time, what remained constant was a highly refined vocabulary of imperial condescension that at once emphasized the inferiority and encouraged the loyalty of all China's tributaries, far and near. It was this Sinocentric assumption of universalistic overlordship--the idea of a Chinese "empire without neighbors"--that blurred the distinction between maps of "China" and Chinese maps of "the world."