Heaven is Round, Earth is Square - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 142

mittheconstructionofanysortofpreciseprojection.Hedoesinsertalatitudescale
across the top and bottom of the map, inferred from other sources, but that is as far
as he can go. Via Hondius, this becomes Purchas's 'bad' map of China (Fig. 19).
To prop up his 'good' map, the Saris map, Purchas applied a grid of latitude and
longitude over it based on Portuguese data (Fig. 20). In so doing, however, he dis-
covered that the longitude values in the sources available to him did not agree with
'thegenerallopinion'.Purchassuspectedthatthemisfithadtodowiththecompet-
ition between Spain and Portugal in the wake of the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494,
whichclaimedtodividetheglobebetweenthetwostates.Becausethedivisionwas
based on longitude, it mattered deeply what longitude readings were ascribed to
places over which these states wanted control, even before they actually got there.
But the Iberians aren't entirely to blame. Earth being square, Chinese cartograph-
ers had already imposed a template that stretched China out of its natural shape,
dragging Beijing, for example, further east than it should have been. Purchas's fate
was to mash together two incompatible geometries in order to come up with what
hethoughtwasatruemapofChina.Theunfortunateresultofthislaudableattempt
was that the distortions of one made worse the distortions of the other. Purchas's
rendering of the Saris map ends up being his own heroic creation, a hybrid that
looksassuspiciouslyaccuratetoEuropeansasitdoestoChineseandyetfallsshort
of both standards.
Wecan'tblamePurchas.HecreatedhismindscapeofChinaonthebasisofwhat
he believed. It was simply an image, after all. No navigator would have dreamed
of sailing to Coleridge's sunless sea with only the Saris map as his guide, for the
simple reason that no navigator had sailed to China to draw it.
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Oscar Wilde once famously quipped that 'a map of the world that does not include
Utopiaisnotworthevenglancingat'.IfXanaduwasColeridge'sUtopia,hewasn't
going to find it on either of the maps of China in Purchas his Pilgrimes . Even if
Purchas hadn't emptied all the little rectangular labels festooning the Saris map,
Xanadu wouldn't have been there, for by the fourteenth century it was a ruin that
the Ming had abandoned to the Gobi Desert. Not so the Selden map. There it is, in
the north-east corner of China, mysteriously inscribed inside a gourd instead of a
circle: 'Upper Capital of the Jin and Yuan dynasties'. 'Upper Capital' in Chinese
isShangdu,whichinPurchasbecame Xamduandwasfiltered throughColeridge's
fertile imagination - and his need to stretch a spondee (two stressed syllables,