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tionofthe Jesuit whostated categorically that China is'almost fouresquare, asthe
Chinois themselves describe the same'. This was indeed what people of the Ming
would say about the shape of their country if asked. It was an idée fixe that China
was a rectangle. Zhang captures that idea with the illustration that opens his first
chapteroncosmography.Itisasimplehalf-foliodiagramofanelongatedrectangle
inside a circle, with a caption quoting the ancient adage, 'Heaven is round, earth is
square'.
This was the design principle that no Chinese cartographer, not even Zhang
Huang, could entirely escape. Look again at the Saris map in Purchas, which was
derived from Luo Hongxian's 1555 map of China (Figs. 20, 22). The south-east
coast does curve, and the Gulf of Bohai takes a bite out of the north-east coast, but
theoverallshapeisroughlysquaredoff:certainlyenoughtostaywithinthecosmic
formula of a round heaven and a square earth. The fact that the word for 'square',
fang ,isalsothetechnical name ofthesquaresinLuo'sgridonlyhelps.Allacarto-
grapher had to do was to keep adding squares equally in all four directions until he
had a complete map of the country. A large square emerges as the sum of its small
squares: the place and the map produce each other.
Now look again. It is just as easy to reverse the logic and see Luo's China as
not square but ovoid, which Luo squared up as well as he could. To see China as
square is to see it as Chinese culture has taught Chinese to believe it to be. To see
China as a different shape is to see it without that preparation - and this is what
the Europeans who first saw Chinese maps in the sixteenth century did. They ex-
perienced China from its coastal edge, which is unambiguously curved. Looking
at Chinese maps, which they had to, having at first none of their own, they shaped
theirimageofChinaintoanoval.PurchasdescribedtheirovoidrenderingofChina
as being in the form of a harp, and believed they were mistaken. But this was a
mutually constructed mistake: Chinese cartographers pushed China into as square
a shape as they could manage, then European cartographers rounded the lower
coast to conform to their maritime experience, following which mapmakers back
in Europe then incorporated this massaged version of the Chinese map of China
into their world maps. These operations produced the image of China in Ortelius,
then in Hondius, then in Speed, and then in most of the great atlases of the seven-
teenth century. Purchas's instinct to trust the unmassaged Chinese version on the
Saris map is a good one, just the sort of instinct that always kicked in with anti-
quarians such as Purchas and Speed and Selden: always go to the source closest to
the time and place of whatever it is you are investigating. It's just that Purchas did
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