Continuity and Change
Qing documents from the last Dutch embassy to China in 1794-1795, a year or so after the Macartney episode, help to explain why the Chinese tributary viewpoint proved to be so tenacious, and why the Qing authorities were so confused and dismayed by Great Britain's failure to meet Chinese expectations in 1793. Although the Dutch mission, designed to celebrate the Qianlong emperor's sixtieth birthday (and, of course, to promote trade), was considered an irregular event, it conformed in every respect to the basic requirements of Chinese tributary ritual. Holland's preliminary letter, sent from its fictitious "king" to the Qianlong emperor in the summer of 1794, captures the distinctive flavor of a vassal's petition to his feudal superior. The Chinese version reads in part: "From the time of the Kangxi emperor's reign [1662-1722] onward . . . [we foreigners] have all been transformed by China's civilizing influence [xianghua]. Throughout history there has never been a monarch with such a peerless reputation as you possess, my exalted emperor."

Small wonder China had such a well-developed sense of its exalted status. In response to the Dutch mission, the Qianlong emperor replied:

I have now reigned for sixty years, so that the four seas are forever pure and all the regions of the world have all been transformed by Chinese culture. My virtuous reputation has spread far and wide . . . and I have [always] treated Chinese and foreigners as one family. . . . Now [representatives of] the myriad countries, scaling mountains and sailing seas, have come, one after another, to offer birthday congratulations. . . . [This] heavenly dynasty views all [people of the world] with equal benevolence, and although some may come to China with only meager [tributary presents], all will leave amply rewarded . . . . [Since you admire Chinese culture (muhua) and will be receiving valuable tokens of imperial favor with this edict,] may these gifts strengthen your bonds of loyalty and integrity, preserving good government in your kingdom and making you forever worthy of my esteem."

As I have argued elsewhere, well into the nineteenth century Qing documents on foreign relations, including maps, continued to reflect this tone, using the same basic vocabulary.

It simply will not do to dismiss this pervasive and tenacious world view as empty rhetoric. One can acknowledge the flexibility and sophistication of traditional China's approach to foreign relations--and even accept James Polachek's argument that the "inertia of the [Chinese] central-government political system . . . [was] the chief obstacle to foreign policy change"--without denying, as Polachek himself puts the matter (somewhat indelicately), "the pompous 'Celestialism' of the late Ch'ing [Qing] court posed a very real problem for those would have brought China more speedily into the modern world."

This much we know: On the eve of the first Anglo-Chinese War of 1839-42, world maps of the sort produced by individuals such as Cao Junyi and Zhuang Tingfu were at best a dim memory for most Chinese scholars. From the late seventeenth century into the nineteenth, the vast majority of Chinese mapmakers ignored Jesuit constructions of the world almost entirely. Most did not even chose to pattern their cartographic productions after Luo Guangxian's grid-oriented Guang Yutu. Far more popular were maps of the Tianxia quantu variety, or those based on the rhythmic and colorful cartography of Yu Shi. A striking example of the latter type is an untitled and anonymous "world map" of 1743 that is now housed in the Oriental Manuscripts Division of the British Library.

Yet at least a few indigenous mapmakers carried on the cartographic traditions established by the Jesuits--assisted now by the efforts of a new breed of Western missionaries, primarily Protestants. For instance, Li Mingche, a well-known Daoist priest and scientist with foreign contacts, included two relatively "modern" illustrations of the Eastern and Western hemispheres--complete with lines of latitude and longitude--in his Huantian tushuo (Illustrations of Encompassing Heaven; 1819). Moreover, every late eighteenth and early nineteenth century example I have seen of the defensively oriented scrolls known generically as Haijiang yangjie xingshi quantu (Complete Map of [China's] Coastal Configurations) begins with a colorful and quite faithful line-drawn rendering of the eastern hemisphere based on Chen Lunjiong's Haiguo wenjian lu--the same basic model that appears on Ma Junliang's maps in the Tianxia quantu tradition. Although the Chinese empire usually appears in such renderings to be as large as Africa (which embraces one-fifth of the earth's total land area), the sailient feature of the map is its unmistakably "modern" appearance.

After China's defeat at the hands of the British in 1842, editions of the Haijiang yangjie xingshi quantu begin to reflect a new awareness of the Western presence in treaty port areas--significantly, by means of textual remarks to the effect that "during the Daoguang period [1820-1850] Western countries [began to] trade at this place." Such cartographic changes were part of a growing sense on the part of at least some Chinese scholar-officials that China had to acquire more up-to-date knowledge about the outside world in order to survive. The two most important books to provide this information, both based substantially on Western maps, were Wei Yuan's Haiguo tuzhi (Illustrated Gazetteer of the Maritime Countries; 1843) and Xu Jiyu's Yinghuan zhilue (A Short Account of the Maritime Circuit; 1849). What these two pioneering works had in common was a desire to, in Wei's words, "describe the West as it appears to Westerners."

From the 1860s to the 90s, as part of China's Self-Strengthening Movement (1862-1895), study associations, books, and journals devoted to geographic and cartographic issues began to proliferate in China. The publication of Wang Xiqi's massive Xiaofanghu zhai yudi congchao (Collected Texts on Geography from the Small Square Vessel Studio; 1877-1897), which brought together several hundred individual Qing dynasty titles, marked a watershed in China's geographical awareness. Meanwhile, Chinese cartographers began to produce their own colorful, modern-looking maps. The Beijing Library has collected several of these works, with titles such as Diqiu wu tazhou quantu (Complete Map of the Five Great Continents of the Globe; 1874); Diqiu quantu (Complete Map of the Globe; 1883) and Diqiu wanguo quantu (Complete Map of the Myriad Countries of the Globe; 1895. Certain mapmakers, including Yao Wentong, Gong Zhai, Chen Zhaotong and Wen Shao, even managed to achieve a certain limited celebrity. In the 1880s and 90s, the Qing court itself attempted to update and standardize its geographic and cartographic practices.

But it was the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95 that sounded the death knell of traditional Chinese cartography. From this time onward, in elite journals and even popular almanacs and encyclopedias, Chinese readers sought ever more accurate knowledge about other parts of the world, including once-despised Japan. The rise of Chinese nationalism--generated by China's humiliating defeat at the hands of the so-called "dwarf-bandits" (Wokou)--brought a heightened awareness of the wages of foreign imperialism. Chinese cartography, like many other areas of Chinese life after 1895, became suffused with the spirit of patriotism and political action. One revealing illustration can be found in a map contained in a 1912 almanac (Zhonghua minguo yuannian lishu), issued in the name of the newly established Republic of China. Although not particularly sophisticated in terms of mathematical cartography, the map is fascinating because its commentaries strikingly identify the various places taken from China by foreign imperialism, including the province of Taiwan and the tributary states of Korea, the Liuqiu Islands and Annam. From this time onward, Chinese nationalism affected in fundamental ways the rendering of geographical space by cartographers in China.