Podcast with Marco Caboara, author of “Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735”

Marco Caboara

Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735. Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity, and greed”.

 

 

Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735, Marco Caboara (Brill, October 2022)
Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735, Marco Caboara (Brill, October 2022)

Marco Caboara is the Digital Scholarship and Archives Manager at the Lee Shau Kee Library at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

In this interview, Marco and I talk about this project, what it says about how Europeans understood China, and his favorite maps in the collection.


Nicholas Gordon has an MPhil from Oxford in International Relations and a BA from Harvard. He is a writer, editor and occasional radio host based in Hong Kong.