What’s Wrong with this Map? - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 4

me why I was taking the map out of China when I had already been explicitly
warned not to do so. The penny dropped. He knew all about the customs inspec-
tion in Shanghai. The incident was in my official security dossier - a fat file that it
wouldamusemetoreadsomeday,althoughthatdaywillnevercome-andhehad
read it. This was a surprise. Remember that this was 1976. Security files had not
yet been computerised; photocopiers were rare; and anyway, the first rule of secur-
ity officers is never to let information out of their control. But I was a foreigner,
andbysimplelogicahighsecurityrisk.WhereverIwent,myfilefollowedmelike
a patient dog. My exit permit said I was leaving through Friendship Pass, so that is
where my file would wait for me.
I had no answer that would do anything but incriminate me further to his sat-
isfaction. I could hardly try explaining to him that China's hyper-sensitivity about
maps was based on a fetish, not on reality. The map was only as real as the paper
it was printed on, a transient representation that could be altered or denied at will.
To me it was merely a useful object, something it would be hard to replace back
home,andcertainlynotforthepriceIhadpaidforit.Theborderguardstartedfrom
another point entirely. A map did not merely represent China's sovereignty: it was
that sovereignty. For him, the map existed at a level of reality higher than the real
world. The paper was less real than the nation itself.
Map fetish is hardly unique to China. We all invest objects with a significance
that,withoutus,theywouldnothave.Inthedaysofmonarchythebodyofthesov-
ereign was treated as a fetish, the physical embodiment of the sacred, and anyone
who transgressed it was guilty of high treason. Now that we are past the age of
monarchies, this primitive aura has been sublimated and transferred to the body of
the nation. A king could lose a bit of territory - and frequently did when he had
to marry off one of his children - and no one would call it a sacrilege. But stick
himwithapenknife,andthehighestpossibletreasonhadbeencommitted.Modern
states are immune to penknives, but not to a neighbour that would claim the tiniest
bit of territory. Take an inch and its entire legitimacy is threatened. Move a bound-
ary on a map and the same terrible indignity followed. So long as the national map
stands in for the sacred nation, more real in some ways than the nation itself, a re-
gime anxious about its legitimacy cannot afford to let it out of its sight. I had no
choice but to leave the map at the border post before continuing south into a less
desperate version of state socialism.
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