What’s Wrong with this Map? - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 10

had come to his attention because Robert Batchelor, an American historian of the
British empire, noting an entry for a map of China in an old catalogue, had called
it up. David had gone down to the basement stacks to dig out the long, narrow box
in which it had lain undisturbed for close to a century, and had then called me over
to take a look. Thanks to Robert's initiative, here it lay before us, three and a half
centuries after it had been deposited in the library and, by our guess, roughly four
after it had been drawn and painted.
The more I examined the map, the more it troubled me. It just didn't look
like any Chinese map I had seen from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644). It was all
wrong. First of all, it covered more space beyond China than any Ming map usu-
ally showed. This was a picture not just of what the people of the Ming thought of
ashomebutalso ofthevast surroundingregionthat laybeyondtheir borders,from
Japan in the upper right-hand corner to Sumatra in the lower left. The Philippines
and Borneo stood where you would expect them, out in the ocean. The familiar
outline of the coast of Vietnam was there too, as were the Malay Peninsula and the
larger islands of today's Indonesia. Chinese cartography has certain conventions
about how to depict these places, usually jammed in and flattened around the es-
sential body of China. Those conventions were starting to change towards the end
of the dynasty, admittedly, but no late Ming map looked like this. The first lesson
of map history is that maps are copies of other maps. This wasn't a copy of any-
thing I knew.
The map was also wrong in terms of how it balanced the places it depicted. The
heart of the map was not China, which is what Ming maps, whether of the region
or of the entire world, had trained me to expect. Instead, the centre of the map was
occupied by the South China Sea, the now noisily contested zone that then was
commercial common ground for every port and state in East Asia and, as the spice
trade took Europe by storm around the turn of the seventeenth century, for ports
and states as far distant as Goa, Acapulco and Amsterdam. To arrange his map
around a vast sea was a most strange thing for the cartographer to do, not just be-
cause tradition didn't allow for it but also because there is almost nothing there: a
holeinthecentreofthemap.Ratherthanlettingthelandformsdominatethemind-
scape he had drawn, the mapmaker had pushed the landforms to the periphery and
invited us to contemplate the sea.
Finally, and most troublingly of all, the map simply looked too familiar. How
we see East Asia cartographically today, how we recognise the shapes of the land
and water, is the result of a lot of subsequent history. Our visual idea of this part