Heaven is Round, Earth is Square - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 134

the county, a monumental task that no career-oriented magistrate would dream of
wasting his time on, especially as it promised to get all the rich people up in arms.
Luo volunteered to do the work. It was a gruelling task that took him six years to
complete. Measuring fields may have been the practical experience that inspired
Luo to take on the much bigger project of resurveying the entire country. He didn't
actually go that far, but on the basis of his survey work he decided that he had the
methods to redraw the map of China. This led to the achievement for which Luo
is now celebrated, the publication of an atlas of forty-five regional and provincial
maps, plus one national map, entitled Guang yutu or Enlarged Territorial Atlas
(Fig. 25). China's first comprehensive national atlas was published in 1555, sev-
enty years before Speed issued his.
One of the conspicuous features of Luo's atlas is his single-handed revival of
the method of drawing maps by laying them across a grid of uniform squares. The
techniqueinChinadatesbacktoatleastthethirdcentury,althoughitsfullpotential
for accurate cartography was not fully realised until the fourteenth century, when
the cartographer Zhu Siben produced a stunningly accurate gridded national map
2 metres square. Grid-mapping fell so far out of use after the Yuan dynasty that it
took Luo three years to locate a copy of Zhu's national map. It came without in-
structions but was enough for Luo to refine the technique and use it to produce the
Enlarged Territorial Atlas . The atlas was a commercial success and became the
industry standard for all subsequent cartography of China, including the map that
Saris seized and Purchas reproduced in Purchas his Pilgrimes .
The Saris map lacks Luo's grid, presumably because the original lacked it.
Chinese map publishers preferred to omit the grid, which some regarded as aes-
thetically unpleasing. For Europeans, by contrast, a grid of latitude and longitude
was what they now expected on their maps: the grid was the signature of accuracy.
So Purchas obliged, deciding 'to adde Degrees to help such Readers as cannot doe
it better themselves'. This addition looks nice, and since the lines curve, they cre-
ate the illusion that Luo drew the original according to a curved projection, which
he didn't. By gilding the lily in this way, Purchas tried to lend the Saris map even
more authority as the correct map of China. What tells him he is right is the secret
he learned from the Jesuit missionary Pantoja, which we have already read: that
China is 'almost foure square'. But is it?
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