Concluding Remarks
Viewing matters from one angle, we might say that Chinese cartography in late imperial times impeded a more "realistic" understanding of foreign lands and peoples. Certainly it both expressed and reinforced a tributary-based perspective on Sino-foreign relations--one that probably over-estimated the submissiveness and dependency of aliens. Moreover, the emphasis in so many Chinese "world maps" on the great military conquests and unprecedented territorial expansion of the Qing dynasty may well have contributed to an exaggerated sense of self-confidence on the eve of the Western intrusion.

The overwhelming majority of Chinese mappaemundi--including works produced after the Jesuit interlude--depicted "the world" as if the foreigners inhabiting it existed precariously on the fringes of the Chinese empire. Whole continents appeared either as tiny offshore islands or as inconsequential appendages to China's land mass--terrestrial afterthoughts, so to speak. It is not at all clear, however, that a "more "realistic" depiction of foreign lands would have produced a greater sense of military threat. Indeed, some scholars argued that Jesuit-style maps were designed quite deliberately to mislead the Chinese into thinking that the aggressive, avaricious people from "the Great Western Ocean" were farther away than they actually were.

Moreover, we should remember that barbarians were not always marginalized in Chinese "world maps"--even those with certain "traditional" features. Scholars such as Cao Junyi, Yan Yong, Chen Lunjiong, Ma Junliang, and Zhuang Tingfu, for example, made concerted and largely successful efforts to depict foreign territories accurately; and the Manchus, for their own political reasons, produced excellent maps of the Qing empire with Jesuit assistance. In fact, it seems clear that reliable cartographic information existed for those scholars who wanted it, despite Manchu efforts to keep certain types of knowledge to themselves, and notwithstanding the understandable confusion produced by so many different renderings of barbarian space. But the incentive to seek this knowledge out, like the incentive to disseminate it widely, does not seem to have been particularly powerful--at least not until the rise of Western imperialism in the mid-nineteenth century. Quite the contrary, there were political incentives to support the status quo.

This line of analysis assumes a certain pragmatic approach to cartography that obscures other ways of thinking about maps. For many Chinese scholars, maps--world maps in particular--were designed to be appreciated, not simply employed. Although such works had a certain (limited) practical value, they had a much greater emotional appeal. As Liang Zhou put the matter in the introductory remarks to his highly influential map of 1593: "[This work] deals with the grandeur of China's mountains and rivers as well as the excellence of its people, past and present." Emperors and officials may have required certain kinds of finely wrought maps for specific military and administrative purposes, but they also needed large-scale maps as a means taking "spiritual journeys [shenyou] across vast space," in the poetic words of Zhuang Tingfu. Indeed, we know that certain mappaemundi, such as the Liangyi xuanlan (Map for the Profound Observation of Heaven and Earth; 1603) were designed and used expressly for such purposes.

By combining aesthetics, cosmology, history and culture in particularly creative and compelling ways, the makers of Chinese world maps often sought to blur the conventional distinction between actual, lived space and imaginary, idealized space. To put the matter a bit differently, the works they produced played something akin to the role that Geertz ascribes to ritual, linking "the world as lived with the world as imagined."

It is sometimes said that traditional Chinese landscape paintings are not so much depictions of nature as they are statements about the "nature of nature." Similarly, many traditional Chinese mappaemundi are not so much "renderings of the world" as they are cultural statements about the "nature of world." Their purpose, at least in part, was to reinforce certain abiding cultural myths which, in turn, sustained China's self-image--stories about the Central Kingdom's advantageous geographical and cosmological location, its glorious conquests; its impressive explorations; its heros, its, famous landmarks, and its powerful influence on other lands and peoples. Many of the places depicted or referred to in Chinese maps of the world provoked powerful reactions--regardless of whether they were actual locations or purely mythological sites.

This was true not only for points to be found in China Proper, such as the legendary "Sea of Constellations," but also for points beyond. Indeed, one reason for including place names from the Shanhai jing in so many Chinese mappaemundi, was not only to create a sense of comprehensiveness, but also to trigger certain poetic and other literary associations. Every member of the Chinese elite--and probably a number of literate commoners as well--knew of Tao Qian's famous poem, inspired by looking at the illustrations in the Shanhai jing ("Du Shanhai jing"). Two lines suggest its value as a source of imaginary inspiration:

"I view the pictures in the Classic of Mountains and Seas.

A drifting glance [liuguan] encompasses the ends of the universe."

Quite possibly Tao's poem refers to a map (or maps) no longer extant. In any case, dozens of his lines mention specific places in the Shanhai jing--each connected with colorful and well-known images that circulated freely in Chinese folklore. Thus we read:

Far away, the Locust River Range;

At hand, the famed Hanging Gardens Hill.

To the south and west you see the Kunlun Mountains;

The shining atmosphere is hard to match.

The Shanhai jing tells us what every Chinese literatus already knew: that the Locust River Range is topped with the finest gold, silver and jade; that the Hanging Gardens Hill has a tutelary deity with the body of a horse, a human face, tiger stripes and the wings of a bird; and that--as everyone was surely aware--the Kunlun Mountains are the legendary source of the Yellow River, not to mention the abode of the Queen Mother of the West (Xiwang mu). References to even more remote places in Chinese maps--regions inhabited by strange beings such as "The People with Perforated Chests," "The People with One Arm," "The People with Three Bodies," and "The People with One Eye"--naturally conjured up a different set of exotic associations, images shared by elites and common people through media such as encyclopedias and almanacs.

In short, Chinese world maps in late imperial times had several purposes--not all of them either pragmatic or "scientific." Unlike works in the Huangyu quanlan tu tradition, specific claims of territorial jurisdiction in Chinese mappaemundi took a back seat to more general claims of feudal overlordship. And until the twentieth century, mathematical precision was never considered a cartographic end in itself. To be sure, Chinese mapmakers understood the utility and appeal of accurate measurement, and their colleagues in astronomy developed sophisticated instruments that made possible the projections and coordinate systems that Westerners associate with Ptolemaic cartography. But throughout most of the imperial era, they found no compelling reason to conceive of the world as spherical, nor did they see any special merit in drawing all maps "to scale." (After all, the eunuch-admiral Zheng He made his way to the coast of Africa in the early fifteenth century without much difficulty.) Besides, cartographers knew that commentaries could always provide precise geographic details, if they should prove necessary.

Despite a long tradition of sophisticated geographical and cartographic scholarship, an equally long history of foreign exploration (and conquest), and the systematic acquisition of information on barbarians of various kinds, the "outer" world as a whole remained relatively unimportant to the vast majority of Chinese--elites and commoners alike.

In the West, the great voyages of discovery from the late 15th century onward ignited interest in "capturing the world as a single ordered image." But Zheng He's earlier--and in some ways much more impressive--sea voyages had no such effect in China; in fact, they were a source of embarrassment. And whereas the possession and display of a world map or globe from the Renaissance onward in Europe signified that the owner was "a knowledgeable and worldwise citizen," it meant no such thing in imperial China. Thus, until forced to reconsider their craft by new political and cultural priorities, Chinese mapmakers generally made the choice to depict the world not so much in terms of how it "actually" was, but rather in terms of how they wanted it to be.

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COPYRIGHT 2009 Richard J. Smith , All rights reserved.
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