Heaven is Round, Earth is Square - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 131

commercial publishers, who promised non-scholarly readers that they would get
all they needed in a single, affordable format that left nothing out. Fangyu is an
ornate but still conventional way to designate not China but the earth. The earth
wassquare( fang )tothefourdirections,andhumansrodeonitastheywouldridea
cart( yu ). Yitong ,'unifiedunderonerule',isaeuphemismthattheMongolsusedto
describe China when they conquered it in the thirteenth century - under none oth-
er than Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan'. And since the Mongols 'unified' China to make
the Yuan dynasty, the Ming, not to be outdone, claimed the identical achievement
for themselves. So the language of unification stuck, and indeed is still a term in
common use today to designate China's national space. Finally, huang Ming , the
simplest part of the title: unpacked, it means the imperial ( huang ) dynasty called
the Ming. The Map of China fails to translate any of this, but then Purchas had no
one to ask what the original title actually said. Better, as he put it, 'to give an un-
certayne truth'.
The map from which Purchas worked has disappeared. Such wall maps were
common at the time and relatively inexpensive, especially in the province of Fuji-
an,whichwasthecentreofmass-marketpublishingintheMing.Unfortunately,no
other copy of this map has survived the intervening four centuries in China. The
frailty of paper is not the only reason; the change of dynasty in 1644 was also a
factor. The Manchus, who invaded from Siberia to rule China under the Qing dyn-
asty, were uneasy about the legitimacy of their conquest. They had to undermine
the lingering appeal of the native dynasty they ousted if they were fully to replace
the Ming. One way of doing this was to outlaw all representations of the old dyn-
asty. Accordingly, only a fool would keep a Unified Terrestrial Realm of the Ming
Empire Complete at a Glance up on the wall; only a greater fool would not get rid
of it entirely, lest some nosy neighbour decide to denounce him to the new author-
ities forthe capital crime ofwanting to deny the legitimacy ofthe Qing and restore
the old regime. The odds of this map surviving self-censorship at the change of
dynasty are thus almost nil. The maps that have survived have done so almost en-
tirely outside China.
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JohnSpeedwasLondon'smostsuccessfulmappublisherduringthereignofJames
I.His Prospect of the Most Famous Parts of the World -theworldatlasinwhichhe
reproduced Hondius's map of China that Samuel Purchas so disdained and which
he rotated so that north was at the top - would be England's authoritative account