The publication of Marco Caboara’s Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 is an event to celebrate. At long last, every map of China printed in Europe—from Ortelius’s first map of 1584 to Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map of 1735—has been recorded and referenced in a single source.
This is not only an achievement of carto-bibliography—as important as it is that students of cartography and map aficionados will be able to identify and date any printed map of that seminal period—but also for the way such cataloguing has been accomplished, with historical background and context, for the additional essays, and not least for the generous color illustrations that seem to second every argument, this book has far reaching implications. Left behind a knowledge scattered and fragmented, tenuously sustained by a few scholars, or based on hearsay and map collectors’ lore.
It is significant that Regnum Chinae is the fruit of a research project taken up by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), whose library houses one of the most remarkable collections of maps of China in the world; the author, Marco Caboara, who is Head of the Special Collections, has taken the institution’s tradition of stewardship to new heights, one where new knowledge has been constantly integrating a growing thoughtful collection. Little has been written about maps of China before, the only precedent in English being China in European Maps, published twenty years ago precisely by this prestigious university thanks to its first librarian Min-min Chang.
This major work is the result of a collective endeavor; besides his own department, Caboara has counted with the collaboration of the Explokart research team at the University of Amsterdam; the map illustrations come mainly from those two sources, first the HKUST Library, and second the Allard Pierson (Special Collections) at the University of Amsterdam, and completed with other sources. Nor has publisher Brill spared any effort in bringing this ambitious project to fruition, reflected among other things in the rich illustrations brought no matter the source.
Maps are among the most important documents to survive from the past.
The maps catalogued here are those describing China as a geographical and political unit and usually titled as such—“China”—not as part of a continent or larger geographical area; either printed in a book or atlas as it was usually the case, even part of its frontispiece, or the rare instances of being printed in a separate sheet; regardless whether the map was large or small, pocket-sized, or even included in a deck of cards where, tellingly, China would be the king of hearts.
The research has yielded 127 different maps printed in the 150-year period with the welcome discovery of a few previously unknown. Arranged chronologically, each map is systematically presented and referenced with the history of publication and editions, public libraries where they can be found, and bibliography. For the delight of the most demanding reader, every state (the version and accompanying modifications of the original map’s copperplate) has been identified too, explained in detail, with close-up illustrations indicating the changes.
Far from being dry, the entries are enriched with the stories that made these visions of another world possible, “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity, and greed.”
The maps came in waves.
The classification and systematic cataloguing enhances the near exhaustive information. In the introduction, Caboara offers a guide to the “family of maps” which reveals each map’s genealogy by identifying the models by Ortelius, Hondius, Purchas, Blaeu, Sanson, Martini, et al., to which most maps can be related.
It is illuminating, as Caboara says, how these maps appeared, not “slowly and progressively, following the gradual expansion of Western commercial and missionary contacts; rather, they came in waves.” The first wave was in 1580-1590, prompted by the unification of Portugal and Spain under Philip II, who put an end to cartography as the “secret science” for the Iberians; it took advantage of the Jesuits’ early but growing knowledge, and gave way to Ortelius’s iconic first printed map of China.
A second wave (1640-1650) marked by the fall of the Ming dynasty “and the travel back to Europe of Jesuit missionaries such as Martino Martini and Michael Boym, who brought with them Chinese maps which they translated into Latin and converted into Western maps.” Martini’s map of 1655 became for 80 years “the most reprinted and reliable cartographic image of China.” And a third wave, in the 1730s, epitomised by d’Anville’s map published in Paris, result of two decades of collaboration between the Jesuits and the Qing dynasty cartographers in the Chinese survey atlases.
A primary conclusion emerges from this catalogue: the Jesuits’ protagonist role in the mapping of China. They appear as formidable catalysts for their resolve, skills, and entrepreneurship, but Caboara also points to something else. There were Jesuits like Martini and the polymath Athanasius Kircher who sought to publish in Amsterdam, a Protestant stronghold, aware of this city’s superior quality printing and unmatched distribution network, hence starting to bridge the religious divide in Europe. Trailblazers of the China-West cultural encounter, the Jesuits were, besides, the unsung enlightened before the Enlightenment.
When Christian missionaries brought to China new “Western learning” in the late Ming, it was astronomy and cartography that were most enthusiastically embraced by Chinese scholars, a “foreign” knowledge that challenged Chinese worldview. Yet in these Western printed maps of China we see the opposite, the influence of Chinese cartography. What are those maps and how had they come about? The answers rest in a unique blend of Chinese and Western visions fruit of a shared experience that challenges both Eurocentric and Sinocentric views.
Elucidating Chinese influence in general and for every map is one major contribution of this book. There was a type of map present since the Song dynasty, “often less focused on accuracy and scale and more on the relationship between China and foreign peoples and countries, as well as on the representation of the different layers of the administrative structure of the realm.” Li Xiaocong calls such maps zongtu, here translated as “maps of the whole realm”. Caboara goes on to provide an apt definition for these European printed maps of China:
Maps of China are in a sense the creation of the encounter between Chinese “maps of the whole realm” and the cartographic conventions of the atlas age, started by Ortelius in 1584. These conventions associated a full page with a map to one or more pages of text covering the country according to sources ranging from the authors of classical antiquity to medieval missionaries and travellers and finally to Portuguese and Spanish merchants, navigators and administrators.
Not entirely practical, contents in the maps themselves are usually spare, some recurrent. The Great Wall “which divides China from Great Tartary” is shown in many early maps, but would later under the Manchus be marked with inscriptions such as “useless”, or “built in vain”, and then to dissipate and cease to appear. The Nestorian Stele in Shaanxi is also highlighted in some maps as a tribute to early Christian presence, as well as the small island of Shangchuan, near Macao, mentioned because St Francis Xavier died there.
The stories about each map are so appealing that they make this highly scholarly work a page turner. Most illustrative are the stories behind Ortelius’s first map included in his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum in 1584. It is well known that this map was based on a manuscript by the Portuguese Jesuit Ludovico Giorgio or Luiz Jorge de Barbuda drafted at the behest of Philip II, then king of Spain and Portugal. The eminent scholar Benito Arias Montano had taken the manuscript to his friend and royal cartographer Ortelius in Antwerp. But Caboara points to more sources. Arias Montano had tried to get another map from the orientalist and mathematician Giovanni Battista Raimondi.
Remarkably, and this will come as a surprise for many, it is pointed out that Ortelius’s map shows some similarity with two terrestrial globes extant in Italian libraries attributable to Matteo Neroni, who had worked for Raimondi.
Regnum Chinae is a masterpiece of erudition and a tribute to those mapmakers, publishers, printers, book dealers, and those who transmitted, passed along information.
A number of prestigious specialists contribute essays that complement the catalogue in critical issues: Li Xiaocong retraces the history of Chinese map-making, its influences extending to Korea and Japan, and the early exchanges with Europe, a subject seldom covered in European-language books; Angelo Cattaneo revisits the first European hand-drawn maps of East Asia and China framed by the early exchanges between the two continents; Marica Milanesi on Ortelius’s predecessors; Francisco Roque de Oliveira and Jin Guoping on the portrayal of the coast of southern China; Lin Hong and Mario Cams, about the Jesuits’ most important contributions from Ruggieri to d’Anville; and finally, Emanuele Raini throws light on the puzzling place names and systems of transcriptions.
The themes and insights arising out of these essays are deep and numerous. One such reflection is the paucity of knowledge about China at the time, and how the image of China got into focus for the European audience, rather late. It appears, for instance, that early Portuguese maps of the region—objects d’art in their own right—did not develop with China as the main objective, but the relations with Malacca on one side and with Japan from 1540s for the other side.
Cattaneo’s far-reaching commentaries are on the links through travel and trade between the Greco-Roman oikumene “civilized world” and the Chinese tianxia “all under heaven”. He emphasises how the world map of Fra Mauro (1459) reflects an older world which was made possible by the Pax Mongolica and “the Mongol-Chinese civilization of the Yuan Dynasty”:
It is important to highlight that for Fra Mauro, as well as for the Majorcan cartographers Jafuda and Abraham Cresques, Cathay and Mangi [Marco Polo’s China] did not constitute an extension in longitude of the ancient oikumene, but rather an updating of territories that, having faded into obscurity after Alexander the Great, had become better known in recent times.
Even the name “China” is a later construct. Early maps of east Asia featured Marco Polo’s names Cathay and Mangi. As late as 1545, printed maps by well-known geographers like Ramusio had China and Mexico overlap as though they were the same place, while the Canton River was still confused with the Ganges well into the 1570s even by Mercator. The old riddle was solved by the late 1570s thanks to the observations of Martin de Rada, the first to conclude that Marco Polo’s Cathay and China were the same.
Maps are among the most important documents to survive from the past, for they follow and reflect historical developments. By the early 1730s, the information exchange through networks from Beijing via Paris and St Petersburg led to picture a China of greatly expanded borders—into Tibet, Mongolia, Xinjiang—borders that largely remain today: while the Qing emperors—Kangxi, Yonhgzheng, Qianlong— as powerful as Peter the Great or Louis XIV, ruled over a new China, “a new force to be reckoned with.”
Regnum Chinae is a masterpiece of erudition and a tribute to those mapmakers, publishers, printers, book dealers, and those who passed along information. When discussing Vincenzo Coronelli’s map of 1688 and its versions in several European languages, a reference to the bookshop above Venice’s Rialto Bridge where the maps were sold (and to the bitter legal disputes between Padoani, the bookseller, and Coronelli) evokes a vantage point presiding over a world of relations between these people and the parallels in their works. Caboara had set one purpose from the outset, to lay bare the connections from China to Europe and between various major cities and other centres within Europe, an objective he has eminently accomplished. The eagerness for such connectivity is immediately apparent, both for whom the making and publication of these maps of China was a pan-European project, as well as for the audience these maps reached.
These maps were destined to an increasingly wider public: atlases and maps fed the perennial quests of travel literature, geography and world history, and fired readers’ imagination. This compendium re-enacts those old pursuits. In all its accomplishments, Regnum Chinae is a milestone in both cartographic studies and early historical relations between China and the West, a field that illuminates Sino-Western relations today, it belongs in every public library and deserves the widest readership.