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Hello, I'm Nicholas Gordon, host of the Asian Review of Books podcast done in collaboration with the new books network. In this podcast, we interview fiction and non-fiction authors working in around and about the Asia-Pacific region. Regnum Chide, the printed western maps of China's M35, does something that no one has ever done before. Collect just about every map of China printed in Europe from 384 up until Jean-Paptiste on the landmark map of 1735.
Marco Cabuara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to collect and track down these many different documents and tell the stories behind each one. Qu-stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, and missionary zeal, commercial segasti, and greed. Endqu-quote. Marco is the digital science scholarship and archives manager at the Leeschau Key Library at the Hong Kongs, University of Science and Technology.
Today, the two of us talk about this project when it says about how Europe's understood China and its favorite maps in the collection. Marco, thank you for coming on the show today to talk about your book. The book collects over 120 different maps of China. But why focus on maps?
Why focus on these historical documents and what they tell us about history and how people understood the world? Well, it starts really with the job I have. I'm the curator of a map collection. The HKUSD Hong Kong has the largest map collection on western printed maps of China.
I don't come to this job just by chance. I mean, my background is in history. And then I started Chinese history and classical Chinese. And a bit by chance I got involved in working with this map collection.
The basic feature of this map collection is that, well, basically in East Asia, there is no major map collection of western maps of China, ancient, by ancient 1500 to 1700. So this is kind of a given. To me, the fact that these documents are interesting, they are visually extremely attractive is a given. Because my background is in history and I like to approach students and visitors, both in lessons and towards gallery, towards exhibition.
For me, this is really a way to communicate how history can be extremely vivid. It is quite easy to draw people with this map and to show them how China looked like to westerners 500 years ago. And when people see them and they see, oh, really, the original, maybe I don't believe that we show them real items from 500 400 years ago. So, it kind of creates a relationship to the item and you want to go there and just look and explore them.
So, for me, this is really a way to make people more aware of history and more curious about history. So, how does this project actually come about? I mean, I know this book is the end result of a big project that you and your colleagues did, but what actually was this project? Yeah, this project now that is basically finished now with the publication of the book, but it's going on a bit because we are opening a large-scale map exhibition in HKUSD in the library in the fall in September.
And it will go on for 10 months. And it will feature the maps that you see in the book and it will feature maps on our collection. And it will feature maps of China, both western, Chinese and Japanese. So, it started basically five, six years ago.
And now that I can see it, and it is really like a quite a big adventure. I didn't anticipate at the time how much of my time and energy would take. It came from the fact that when I started working with the library, I just was working part-time on a small project. I was teaching in USD, of course, in Shistory, and the library was looking for someone to write some simple notes on the web about some of the maps of the collection.
It was a very small job. Then the person in charge of the collection went to another university, I took over the collection. And I still thought that I would do something on the maps, but it was not my only duty. I'm also in charge of the archive.
But okay, I do archive most of the time, just maps part of the time. We bought this great collection almost 30 years ago, but now when I started working six years ago, there was no budget anymore to buy new maps. And then everything changed. Everything changed because we got a donor that had previously simply paid for digitizing the maps.
And the other collection we had, that is Classics in the history of science, Galileo, New Thomas, and so on. And this donor gave us a pretty generous donation to subsidize digitizing these items and then came back when I had just started being the head of the unit and said, do you have another project? And to me, my background is Shistory, a sister of China. So I thought, what can I do with this map that goes beyond digitizing them and just writing simple things?
And I saw that basically there was no book about Western maps of China at all, neither small nor large. Neither in Western languages or in Chinese. Just something written about some famous map. Nothing about the whole thing.
And so I proposed this as a project. I got in touch with the main historians of the South Africa, in Amsterdam, because most of these old maps were printed in the Netherlands in 151600. So the best call was starting up, so that I was on a summer holiday in the Netherlands and I decided to stop by the University of Amsterdam, write a mini-mail and ask them to meet me and tell me someone else was doing this. Was there anyone else working on this project?
No. And they had a series that published books on maps of countries seen basically through history. With the same model that my book basically was published in that series and I asked them, would you be interested in having a book on China in your series? Yes, it would be very interesting.
And basically they trained me. I went there for two summers once the fans were approved. And they taught me everything about how to write about ancient maps. Because it's not that easy.
I mean, if you look at the book, you will see many things as stories and who got the map and there is an adventurous part. Another part is very technical. You look at the map, you measure the map, you make technical judgment about the fact that the map has changed over time. It has been modified, how similar it is to different from other maps.
They taught me everything. They taught me everything and basically I almost couldn't believe at the beginning that I would be able to fulfill all the requirements that they had. The book would be a bit shorter or it would take shortcuts. In the end, in 5DS, we did it.
So I want to point to something you mentioned, which is that Amsterdam is the home for a lot of these maps. I think the other one is one of the hubs for map making. And I want to ask that who were the sorts of people, well, first, who were the people making these maps and who were the people that were using these maps? Like, I guess who was the manufacturer?
She was a bad workwright, a manufacturer who was the customer. Well, basically maps, and I emphasize this, it's our collection, the collection that I started with is Western printed maps of China. So they are printed items. And that means they are basically, it's an early form of maps manufacturing.
And it requires capitals and it requires production, very sophisticated production, copper plates and people that can do engraving on copper plates. It requires big distribution and reaching to a large market. The Netherlands from late 1500 to early 1700, which is the time I covered in my book, was by far the most important producer of maps. And books, I mean, they were producing more maps because they were in fact producing more books.
They basically were producing more than 50% of all books printed in Europe at the time and more than 50% of the maps printed at the time. So because of that or the fact that their products were spread over Europe, not just in the Netherlands, they would not just bring these maps in touch. They mostly would bring them in lighting, which is what he commonly understood language in Europe at the time. So they would bring them for their market, but especially for export.
And who would want to use them? Well, it more like who want to read them because the maps had a map at the front and always at the back, it would be text. Text about the country that is depicted in the map. And the approach that people had to these maps is really like now you would have an encyclopedia or Wikipedia entry.
You had the image and then you read the text. So it was for general curiosity with these maps, you could not go to China from Europe. You could not find your way on the coast. You would not be able to know if it was easier to go near the coast of Guangdong or how to reach Shendong.
No, they would give you a general image of the country. So they were for cultural curiosity. So I know the book is mostly about Western maps of China, but there's one chapter that focuses on Chinese maps of China. What were the differences between the maps of China being created by Chinese cartographers?
How are they different? Well, the market for maps in Europe was basically shaped by the fact that the main thing that we printed in the Netherlands that made them leaders were atelases. They created the genre of atelases. That means for each country, there would be a map, every country in the world.
Now, China was a very, very special country from that point of view because when in these atelases you see a map of India, a map of America, a map of Africa, they were maps that were basically completely created by Western cartographers. There was a Western exploration that led them basically to explore the coast. Generally, the coast were known better than the interior, but it all came from Western sources, going to the place, acquiring information, but the maps were from the beginning to the end, Western maps. Even in the case of Indian Ocean, Middle Eastern countries, they had their traditional cartography, but the maps that got printed in the west actually were created in the west.
Because at most they would find a few manuscript maps in foreign languages, but China was different. They started printing maps much earlier than the European, the Song Dynasty in 1100. And when the Europeans started arriving in China, and the cleaning weights of the Marco Polo went to China, they didn't bring back maps. The time that we are looking at had Portuguese arriving in Macau, the Jesuits started learning some Chinese.
They want to know about China and they just go to book shops in the city's area, access to and they buy atelases, printed atelases of China, and they transform these maps into Western maps. So there is basically no Western map of China in print that is not based on Chinese maps. The Chinese maps are always at the source. And some are very accurate, some are focused more on the political system, some are focused on the host and the rivers.
They don't have the system, the European system, or the latitude, so they would give you some time agreed for uniform distance, so that it would just value from A to B is today's watching. And the Westerners had to use these Chinese maps and convert them into the system along with the latitude, stretch them and transform it into Western photography. But always at the beginning there is a Chinese map, which is completely unique. It's connected to the fact that they were printed maps in China, they were not printed maps in any other country, the European right.
You mentioned in your answer that there were kind of waves of, I guess, waves of explorers, or maybe better, waves of information and knowledge being transmitted from China to Europe. Like I started Marco Polo by then, through other explorers and missionaries and so on. I guess, and that translates into the creation of new maps as well. We talked about some of the events in China that triggered, let's say, a new wave of new maps in Europe.
Yeah, basically when I started working on this book, I would concentrate on the big history and then give just as simple as people can be each map. Then the book became mostly 120 stories, about 120 maps. And then I wrote a short introduction trying to get some general principle. And one of the main principles is this wave.
The fact that I cover maps on 1584, the first map of China printed in the West to 1735, almost 150 years. I cover 120 maps, almost a map a year. But they don't go one per year. There are three, four years when you have 30 of that, and you're very new.
And then you're just years where there is just repetition and copy. I took about three waves. Now only one is connected to events in China. The other two are actually connected to the way that Europeans were dealing with China.
So to be concrete, the first wave, basically when we start getting maps of China, it's connected to the fact that in the first map of 1584, towards the end of 1500, there was no big change in China at the time. It was a mean dynasty relative stability. There was a bit more interaction with the West, but just growing in a stable way. What changed is that for 60 years Portuguese had been in that region, and they were not allowing their manuscript maps of China to be spread over Europe.
They would be controlled by the Portuguese government. They were basically a secret, a state secret, how to navigate to China. These are not printed maps. These are what they had were a mix of Chinese maps, and a lot of what is called portal and charts.
So that would allow you in sea charts. Map that would allow you to sail, to sail on the Indian Ocean and ride that. So the Portuguese were not allowing this information to be diffused, especially in printing. But then in 1580, basically Portugal and Spain merge.
And basically Spain acquires Portugal. They are under the same king fillet, who gives the name to the Philippine island, so that shipwire didn't appear. And at that point, the Portuguese are not able to control their information anymore. And so there is a flood of maps of China that the Portuguese have been sitting on, and suddenly goes to print.
So this is the first way. The second wave is around 60 years later, 1640, that's connected with China. So the mean dynasty falls, the Qing, the Manchu dynasty takes over. A lot of Jesuits have to leave China because of the disorders.
Because really, Jesuits are absolutely essential in all these stories. They are the ones that are transmitting the knowledge, the ones that understand Chinese. And so they can use Chinese maps, not just for general information to look at the outline, but they can read them. Chinese maps have a lot of text.
A lot of text about provinces, administration, history. If you don't read Chinese, you can just scratch the surface. So it's just we had to leave China because of the disorders. They went back to Europe.
They were discussing with the Pope. Should we ship our religion to the Qing dynasty? That was still part of the mean dynasty fighting in the south. Some were even converted to Catholicism.
Should we try to do that to work with the Ming? For 10, 15 years, there was this long debate and these people moving. These people moving brought new maps and they also had a lot of time. It wasn't a sign that the missionaries are tiny busy.
They cannot just do cartography. They do a bit of cartography to show back home what the country they are leaving in is about. They are also doing some cartography like Matyori Chi. The most important Jesuit to show to the Chinese that there is more knowledge that the Jesuit can offer to China and to the elites.
Matyori Chi makes a map of the world where America is finally shown, to show to the Chinese elite that the Jesuit should be taken seriously as cons. But mostly these people don't have a lot of time when they are doing missionary work. But when they are back in Europe, they have a lot of time. They just travel when you are in half.
This year in half is spent with an Atlas and just in the case of a very famous cartography Matyori Matyori. She spent this long time with the Chinese Atlas and translated into that team. This is the second way. The third way is towards the end of my book, around 1730.
That's a collaboration. It's not only Chinese, not only Western. It's connected to the fact that the new dynasty, Manchu dynasty wanted to do a survey of the country and to draw maps after that survey. Because before that time, maps were not based on modern-style surveys, measuring with ropes or chains and big teams of people going around.
It was just based on piecemeal accumulation of local information. But this survey is gigantic. It's the largest survey ever made in a country at that time in the world in 1700. And the Jesuit serviced foreign experts.
They had much expertise about, especially the French as we were doing a survey in France at the time, the servant expert. So they published in Chinese maps out of this survey. And these maps don't have a lot of circulation, because even if they are printed, in this case, the Chinese high official and the court prefer to sit on them, not to make them too oblique for one. But the Jesuit translated into French send them back to Europe and make it a big propaganda event so that they are kind of the big keeper of knowledge about China.
The Jesuit are really in my book. Most of the stories about Chinese maps, one way or another, are related to the Jesuit. Another thing that comes through in your book is when the idea of China, like I did, China, I guess, as China, when that really starts to take hold of the European imagination, you know, you note that it was kind of named under a bunch of different names initially. And the maps were kind of focused on either Macau or maybe Japan.
But when does the idea of China as its own place really start to emerge in the European imagination, as shown through these maps? Yeah, the book has two parts. So the largest part is the story of each single map. And there is another part that is an introduction where I wrote one chapter and others call it about everything before that map, everything before 15.
So the first map that really gives the name China to the country is the one, the number one in my book, this 1680. Before that, the knowledge goes back mostly to Marco Polo. Marco Polo went to China around 1300. For more than 200 years, she was the source.
And she didn't know China as one country. He went to China when China was under the Mongol Empire. And the Mongol Empire administered China into different zones. North and China kept the high.
That was the name that Marco Polo gave. And that's out in China. Manji, that is at least the name that Marco Polo gave. They were very different.
The Manji, South and China was taking concrete much later than the northern part. And it was under the South and the song originally. So Marco Polo, there are so many books about Marco Polo went to China. But the third thing is that Marco Polo didn't think in terms of one shine.
For some, they were really two different countries. The North was more connected with Mongols, the steps, the South more connected to maritime trade. Simply, there was not the knowledge that it was people didn't speak Chinese. Even Marco Polo would speak Persian or Mongolia.
So they couldn't even hear that the language was the same language, which mostly towards the local variation. So it's only with this, when the person is already in Macau around 1550, and they start getting much more information on the Jesuit, we also start learning Chinese. And they understand that there is immense empire to the North. And it's one country.
And at that time, it's me. So in fact, we often called China, not China, but it's been a medically damning or damning or something of variation of me. But the understanding is one. But they still cannot enter it.
Because the Jesuits just blocked, and the person who blocked in Macau, it was not free access. And then soon around the time when this remap, that basically is one of my book, 1584, starts, then they can start not only trading along the coast and being in Macau, but really travel across the country. And it's very clear it's one country, this one country. And then they go back to the fact that that country was called Cina by the Latin, was called Chin by the Arabs and India.
And they just settled on this name, China, China. And there was no doubt anymore that it's just one country. So we've talked for quite a bit itself. And we haven't actually talked about some of the actual maps in the collection.
And I know asking this question a bit like asking you to choose your favorite child. But what are some of your, what is maybe one or two of your favorite maps in this collection? And what are the stories behind that, behind these maps? Well, probably two of the earliest.
Also because when I talk about maps, I generally really start showing them. And then I explore them with visitors, I explore them and just unpack them. Because these maps, now these maps are, we're printing mostly in Atlases, they have the equivalent of what now would be an A3 format. Okay, they are just roughly all of that size.
So they are large enough and not super large, you know, something you would stick on a wall, just in front of you, but they are packed with visual information. The first is really the one that opens the book, 1584, is by a cartographer that was active in Antwerp, that at the time was basically low countries, there was not yet the difference between the Netherlands and Belgium, now it's Belgium. Antwerp was the largest port in Europe and the largest printing place in Europe. And hotels or tedious, they would all have the naming in Dutch and Latinise names.
So generally people who do maps would call, we use the Latin name. So, or tedious, this is a map of China, the first. She created the general of Atlases. So she really wanted a map of China for a long time, she was publishing this ad-las year after year, she couldn't get a map of China.
Finally, in 1584 she gets a map of China. In a very complicated way. She gets it, the source was always Portugal, but even at the time when Portugal was already under Spain, still the Portuguese didn't want to get maps out, and they had a way to prevent it. And so she had to pay basically a spy to get a copy of the Chinese maps and finally print it.
And then she prints it, and in that map she puts, for example, Macau, you can find Macau. She puts actually all the main provinces of China in a kind of Portuguese transcription. And then she puts a lot of strange things that supposedly were existing in China now, we know don't exist, like wind cards. So they basically carted and are propelled by a sail, and supposedly can go super fast across the ground.
You find them in maps of China of the first 20, 30 years, always there. You find elephants, you find animals all at the borders. You also find that basically China is very recognizable, but everything else is closed. It's closed, only by the great world, but it's shown as a fortress.
It's closed by a long line of mountains. And basically just looking at that map and being able to recognize the names that people can see, recognize it in Chinese. And at the same time to see the things that are so bizarre, there is no Korea, it is not, should be there, but it's not shown because people know, Japan is out of shape, and the same time the country is definitely there. So it really liked the beginning.
The other map that is really interesting for me is a map that we only have in USD. And in another copy in the Jesuit archives, because something about this map is that they are printed. So the map like the one I told you before about the tedious, between 84 more than 400 years, but more than a thousand copies were printed, actually many thousands of copies were printed. So it's rare, special, the name of my unity, rare and special collection.
It's very special, it's very valuable, but there are many, many copies around the world. But the map that is a favorite for me is connected to a Jesuit name, Mikéleililililil, it was printed in Rome. And it exists only one copy that we have here, and one copy of the Jesuit archives in Rome. And she made it basically not to be published in that last night, not to be sold across Europe.
Both maps are enlightened, so they are maps that are recognizable to every culture of European. But the purpose of your tedious map that you've got before is to be sold, is just to be commercially attracted. That's why there are so many copies there, Zira. This one was basically for the Pope and the King of Spain.
And it had much more accurate information about China, the shape of the country is much more recognizable. Korean-Japan are clear. There is also the Philippines and Southeast Asia. And not only this.
Macau is there, but also the first Jesuit church is there, in a place called Zhao Ching. And that Jesuit church, this map is dated around 1590. The church had been created only five years earlier. So that might be also like a very updated information about China.
And in the Jesuit archive, you see a report handwritten, they're not just printed, but you see it inside a handwritten report, where basically Mikéleililil Jidi, who is the first Jesuit to enter China and know Chinese before Macau. She gives a report to the Pope about what the Jesuit can do to turn basically Asia-Catholic. Country by country. And then she uses the map to explain what can be done.
It was not like an aggressive strategy, it was a missionary strategy, but the map has information about all the promises, how many, what is the political system in China, everything. It says the Great Wall, it has information about the Ming rivers. In a way that is very fascinating, that it was created only for a very small elite, and now exists only in two copies, even though it was by far the best map of China that was available in Europe. So sometimes a map can be extremely informative, valuable, but still not spread across Europe like the other printed maps.
So that's my favorite, this little Jidi map of China, 59. You know, I want to end our conversation by kind of using, I guess, using history to kind of understand the present day, if you're really kind of our present day relationship with maps. Imagine this at the beginning, we're like, go to Wikipedia page and you see a map. Maps are, I know say that their standardize is simplistic and I know we can critique that.
But everyone uses Google Maps, every use of Apple Maps, these maps are, I would say mostly standardized. But do you think after kind of, do you think as someone who studies maps throughout history, do you see the maps we use today differently, and are they perhaps not as standardized as they sometimes see? Well, I mean, maps are a way to present visual information, okay? And so I also use Google Maps all the time.
I mean, in fact, the first time I went to Amsterdam to work with a special collection and learn about cartography, I was not before 2018, it's recent, but I didn't think I was not using Google Maps all the time. Then I had a very detailed address, couldn't find it. I stopped someone on the street that just looked at the Google Map and told me, just go there, okay? And it just was very clear how more powerful the map is than any kind of verbal description.
And after that, I use Google Maps all the time. At the same time, the main difference between Google Maps and these maps is that Google Maps looks like seamless. I mean, you can really zoom in from, and that's what I do often when I teach. I mean, use it, start from a comp, then you go back to the whole world view and then you can show Venice or unfair.
And it's always apparently the same map. And these maps of the past are, these whole addresses, they never match. The map of China has a different China than the Asia maps, the map of the world has another different China. They're all made from different sources.
So they make extremely clear how the sources are different, which basically, I mean, makes you aware of the fact that in the end, there is always a specific source to know the specific territory. Now, for Google Maps, I thought that I had any kind of special advice, even though one of the most sensitive things in Google Maps is that when you use them to look for shops, you will understand that certain shops are shown and certain are not shown in a random way. I mean, it's a specific display that gives access to certain things and others. It's like at the time that I am sounding 1,500, 1,600, 1,700, 1,700, that's where we were.
Okay, so basically, they were made beautiful and they are because they are so packed with information, so packed also with art, they are really great windows into the past. And it really makes you feel that you are seeing the world in a different way, the ancient world. The present Google Maps, they are enormously powerful and they seem completely natural to us when we move around with our world. But in the end, again, after your study, maps were a long time.
It's quite clear they also have the layers that most viewers are not aware of. In fact, basically, no viewers are not technically really good at changing the world. So, well, it's really a different world. Even in the map exhibition that we are presenting, what we plan to do, we plan to have our internet, both Western and Chinese, some contemporary artistic maps, and then basically experience that allows viewers to understand that the relationship with maps is not as simple and immediate as it seems.
For example, a map of the world made in China is China at the center, a map of the world made in Europe as Europe at the center, a map of the world made in the US at the center. Actually, there are only three models of the maps of the world. But generally, until you compete them, you are not aware that how yourself as a viewer and user project into the map is really making such a big difference about its. So, I think that's a good place to end our conversation with Marco Kabbahara, author of Regnum Chine, the printed Western maps of China to 1735.
Marco, I actually have two final questions for you before we close off, which are where can people find your work? And what's next for you? After this very long project? You think the next project might be?
Well, for the book was published in October last year, but as part of the big disruption of supply chains basically became available again for ordering only basically just now in the past few weeks. The book has been published by an academic publisher of the Netherlands in Briel, so if you know the title, which is Regnum Chine, or just like Kabbahara and China, something like that, you can Google it. You will be able to find it there or soon on Amazon when basically Briel releases it. It should be on Amazon soon.
Amazon has any other supply. In terms of the next project, I've been not seen so many times. Now, a very easy answer would be, okay, volume two updates, okay, this stops 1735, so on. But this started for the distance future.
I think this was an all-consuming project for five years. I cannot go back to the same thing just now. I think there are two possibilities on which I received some offers already from publishers. One is to write a popularizing book about Chinese history for Western audience using Chinese maps, so history is seen through maps and maps of China.
So not an academic book. The book you use, I just finished writing this Briel book on maps of China 1584, 1735, is an academic book. You can actually go through it because of the beautiful images and the map by map stories are quite interesting, but it's basically not the book you read from. It's a reference book.
Besides the general book about China's seen through maps, like history of China's seen through maps in the past 800 years, the other one would be something similar, meaning more academic, similar to the one I just finished, but about Chinese maps, not about Western map. Because my background is in classical Chinese, so I've been using a lot of lighting in the past few years. My lighting got very much better. My classical Chinese are big words.
Now it's time for me to go back to Chinese. So you can follow me, Nick with Gordon on Twitter, and Nick with iCK, or iGOR, D.O.N. You can go to azureviewbooks.com and find other reviews, essays, interviews, next-ers. Follow on Twitter, and book reviews, Asia, and you can find many more often reviews of the new books that work at newbooks.com.
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