Heaven is Round, Earth is Square - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 137

( huayi tu )wasadistinctiveChinesecartographicgenreshowingChinaastheheart-
land of civilisation, with peoples who have not had the benefit of civilisation
jammed in unrecognisably around its edges. Zhang uses the title to invoke what is
essentially the Chinese tradition of world mapping, but he goes beyond the genre
by allowing China to blend into a far larger Eurasian continent surrounded by
oceans on all four sides. This may not be Eurasia as we know it, but Zhang ima-
gines the continent more coherently and forcefully than any Chinese geograph-
er had previously done - and without referring to European maps. He is a little
self-conscious about the map, inserting a label in the upper right-hand corner that
explains to the reader that 'it has been included in order to facilitate further re-
search'. Because Zhang is reaching way beyond what his sources allow him to
know, he makes some interesting leaps. Take the huge lake in the middle of the
continent named Hanhai, the Boundless Sea, which the engraver has hatched with
wave marks to indicate that this is a body of water. The term was actually coined
a millennium earlier as a metaphorical name for that great sea of shifting sand, the
GobiDesert,butbytheMingthemetaphorhadbeenlost.Notrealisingthis,Zhang
moves from 'uncertayne truth' to 'certayne errour' by converting the desert into
a vast, non-existent lake. Despite what he gets wrong, Zhang's General Map of
Chinese and Barbarians within the Four Seas steps forward from the cartography
of his time by bringing into view Eurasia, a continent that dwarfs China and ex-
tends far beyond its borders in a way that no huayi tu had ever done before.
Zhang might not have included the map had he not encountered the Jesuit mis-
sionary Matteo Ricci. They met briefly, and the Italian scholar had a great impact
on Zhang, who included in his encyclopaedia a lot of material Ricci gave him:
maps of the eastern and western hemispheres copied from the atlas of Girolamo
Ruscelli (the Latin labels have collapsed into gobbledygook); two azimuthal pro-
jectionsofthenorthernandsouthernhemispheresmarkedoutin360°oflongitude;
and a map of the world based on Ortelius (Fig. 21) - which Ricci later published
as a giant wall map in twelve sheets in Beijing. The inclusion of these maps chal-
lengedChinesewhowerescepticalaboutEuropeanclaimsabouthowfartheytrav-
elledtogettoChina.Zhangwaslivinguptohisprincipleofnotstickingtohisown
preconceptions when something new came along.
The Documentarium absorbed some of the newest cartographical knowledge
from Europe, but the borrowing went the other way as well. Europeans such as
John Saris who travelled to Asia and saw Chinese maps had no way to visualise
Chinaotherthanasthesemapsshowedit.RecallSamuelPurchas'sapprovingcita-