Heaven is Round, Earth is Square - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 136

ship.Andbothclearlysucceeded,fortheirbookswerewidelyreadforgenerations.
Both were the work of men in their forties, although the two men met different
fates. Purchas outlived the publication of Purchas his Pilgrimes by barely a year,
dying just shy of fifty and just short of bankruptcy. Zhang was exactly that age
whenhecompletedthedraftofthe Documentarium ,buthelivedforanotherthirty-
one years, eventually becoming head of the White Deer Grotto, the most prestigi-
ous private academy in Jiangxi Province, indeed in the country, in 1590. Yet even
though he lived to the great age of eighty-one, he did not have the satisfaction of
seeing the Documentarium into print, dying five years short of its publication date
in 1613.
Zhang Huang was not the commercial operator that Samuel Purchas was; nor
was he the social activist that Luo Hongxian had been. But he outmatched both as
a scholar. Luo spotted a problem and burrowed into it as deeply as he could. The
Enlarged Territorial Atlas was the outcome of just such concentration. He was the
kind of scholar who insisted on knowing the practical effect of his research. In the
case ofhisatlas, it wastoimprove geographical knowledge inordertoincrease se-
curity. His own county had once nearly been overrun by bandits, and he believed
that a better grasp of local topography would have contributed greatly to knowing
how to deal with the problem. Geographical ignorance impeded effective adminis-
tration.
Zhang took a less goal-oriented view. The duty of the scholar was to amass the
best knowledge and to make it available to those faced with solving real-world
problems. As he put it in another book he published at sixty, the obligation of the
researcher was not to indulge his own views. It was to achieve reliability. 'What
I have striven for is to make present knowledge reliable and then pass it down to
later ages.' As new knowledge accumulated, older knowledge had to be revised
and thinned out accordingly. New facts 'may then be added, but only when there is
documentation adequate to verify them. I have not dared to rely on my own views
whatsoever to discriminate one fact from another.'Rather than dare to 'give an un-
certayne truth', as Purchas was sometimes willing to do, Zhang strove to hold to
the strictest standards of objectivity.
Physicalandhistoricalgeographytakeupalmostathirdofthe Documentarium ,
a percentage that has guaranteed the inclusion of dozens of maps. One finds the
standard representations of what Chinese thought China looked like, but there is
much else as well. Zhang's General Map of Chinese and Barbarians within the
Four Seas is particularly striking (Fig. 23). 'Maps of Chinese and Barbarians'