China’s World Map Transformed

The Complete Map of All under Heaven as Unified by the Qing Great State for Ten Thousand Years

Figure 1. Da Qing wannian yitong tianxia quantu (Complete map of all under Heaven as unified by the Qing Great State for ten thousand years); Brown University.

Da Qing wannian yitong tianxia quantu (shortened in this essay to Da Qing quantu, or  Complete Map of the Qing Great State) is a commercial map of the world published at the turn of the 19th century (Figure 1). Printed from woodblocks on paper, it consists of eight vertical panels on eight scrolls. (The second scroll from the right is missing, but can be reconstructed  from other copies.) When hung side by side, the map measures 3.4 sq. m. (37 sq. ft.) and composes into an image of what we know as Eurasia. Reading the map from right to left, as Qing Chinese would, we see the eastern hemisphere from the Sea of Okhotsk in the upper right-hand corner to the North Atlantic Ocean in the upper left. The rectangle is bounded on the top by a  compressed image of Russia and on the bottom by a continuous body of dappled water that runs undifferentiated from the South Pacific and Indian Oceans. It glorifies the territorial extent of the Qing dynasty at its height.

The copy of the Complete Map of the Qing Great State held at the Rockefeller Library is one of a dozen or so copies of this map known to survive today, a significant number that testifies to the considerable popularity of this map. Broadly speaking, these copies can be divided into two groups by printing types, relief and intaglio. The relief prints were printed from woodblocks on which the wood was cut away from around the lines and texts that the ink transferred to the paper (Figure 2). The Brown University copy is one of these. All editions of the relief map were printed in black ink, and with the sole exception of the Brown map, all surviving copies are hand-colored. The other type, the intaglio print, was produced by the reverse process of cutting the image into the woodblock so that the indigo-colored ink transferred the blank spaces around the lines and text, which appear in white (Figure 3). These are generally known as the “blue map” because of the striking dark-blue image that resulted. [1] Some half a  dozen copies of each type survive in almost as many editions bearing different dates and places of publication as well as minor variations in title. The intaglio editions are later: the only date associated with any of the surviving blue maps is 1823. [2] By contrast, most of the relief copies carry a date between 1803 and 1814. The Brown University map is one of two surviving copies of the 1814 edition, both published in the coastal city of Fuzhou. [3] Until other copies emerge, we can identify 1803 as the original date for the creation of the Complete Map of the Qing Great State.

Figure 2. Relief print of the Complete Map of the Qing Great State in the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005060/.

Figure 3. Intaglio print of the Complete Map of the Qing Great State called the “blue map,” in the Harvard-Yenching Library: https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005018/.

At first glance, the map appears to be a “traditional” map of China highlighting the  Yellow and Yangzi rivers that has been stretched east and west out of its usual square format. In fact, its intention was to serve as a map of the world, based on a lineage of prototypes that go back to the last century of the Ming dynasty. To pick apart this history, we will analyze its title by reading it back to front: (1) complete map/quantu (2) of all under Heaven/tianxia (3) as unified/yitong (4) for ten thousand years/wannian (5) by the Qing Great State/Da Qing.

(1) Quantu, “complete map” identifies the category of map. The term entered Chinese cartography via the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci (1552-1610), who used it in the title of his adaptation of Typus orbis terrarum, “Image of the Sphere of the Earth,” by Antwerp mapmaker Abram Ortel (Ortelius, 1527-1598) (Figure 4). Ricci drew his first “complete map,” or literally, “map of everything,” in 1584 to show Chinese what the entire world looked like from a European perspective and where China was located in that world (Figure 5). He published enlarged versions of this “complete map” in Nanjing in 1600 and in Beijing in 1602 (Figure 6). [4] The term might not have entered Chinese cartographic practice had Ricci’s map been sequestered inside the palace or forgotten, but it wasn’t. Nanjing publishers took it up with gusto through the last four decades of the Ming dynasty, producing a series of adapted versions that sold well. By hybridizing Ortelian and Chinese traditions, publishers such as Cao Junyi (probably a pseudonym to deflect the charge of plagiarism) created a new, immensely popular genre of world map (Figure 7). [5] The Complete Map of the Qing Great State may be considered the fourth generation in this new Chinese family of maps that Ricci inspired.

Figure 4. Ortelius, “Image of the Sphere of the Earth” from his Theatre of the Sphere of the Earth (Theatrum orbis terrarum), 1570; courtesy of Utrecht University Library.

Figure 5. Matteo Ricci, Yudi shanhai quantu (Complete map of the mountains and oceans of the earth), as printed by Zhang Huang in his encyclopedia, Tushu bian (The documentarium), 1613; courtesy of Harvard University Library.

Figure 6. Matteo Ricci, Kunyu wanguo quantu (Complete map of the ten thousand countries of the earth), Beijing, 1602.

Figure 7. Cao Junyi, Tianxia jiubian fenye renji lucheng quantu (Complete map of the astral correspondences, human vestiges, and routes of all under Heaven and the nine border zones” (1644), courtesy of the British Library.

(2) Ricci’s subject was not China but the world. To name the world, he reached back into the Chinese classics and chose wanguo, “ten thousand countries.” The choice was intentional, reminding readers that the world was a vast space in which China was but one of many countries. [6] Although the publisher of the Da Qing quantu in the text below the title refers to “envoys from the ten thousand countries approaching by land and sea bringing tribute and declaring themselves servants” of the emperor, he does not use it in his title. Instead, he uses tianxia, “all under Heaven,” which can mean the emperor’s realm or the entire world. The publisher exploits the ambiguity by declaring his map to be “a printed attestation of this Glorious Age,” but he also dots exotic locations such as England and the Netherlands here and there, thereby both marking the world and celebrating the vastness of Qing rule.

(3) The concept of yitong, “unification,” is one that China’s Mongol occupiers in the 13th century introduced to justify their sovereignty over China. Despite its foreign origin, the idea of celebrating the historically unprecedented extent of their conquest stuck, so that when the Ming drove out the Mongols and replaced the Yuan with the Ming, its founder declared that he had “unified” or “merged” the realm. [7] And just as the Ming claimed, so did the Qing, each on a scale greater than its predecessor. The Complete Map of the Qing Great State continues this boast.

(4) The next term forward, wannian, “ten thousand years,” declares the permanence of the Qing regime. But it has a more specific rhetorical purpose, and that is to obscure the term that readers expected on a “complete map,” which is wanguo, “ten thousand countries.” By switching out a spatial reference to multiplicity in favor of a temporal reference to unchanging sovereignty, wannian celebrates the Qing without taking account of the world.

(5) The title begins with Da Qing. By my analysis, the conventional translation, “Great Qing,” misses the fact that the adjective is not an honorific but a technical designation for a political formation of Inner Asian origin claiming expansive, universal sovereignty and a sacred mandate to rule. [8] Again it was the Mongols who introduced and indigenized the concept in China, establishing a claim that both the Ming and Qing regimes had to take up as successor regimes of the Yuan Great State.

Most of this history, whoever, is left undeclared on the map. The publisher has included a block of text below the title that explains the map’s origin without referring to its family tree. He claims that the map derives from a map of the same title published in 1767 by Huang Qianren (1694-1771), also known as Huang Zhengsun, grandson of the eminent late-Ming intellectual Huang Zongxi (1610-1695). Although Huang Qianren’s map has yet to be properly published or analyzed, the preface he wrote for it is available. [9] In this preface, Huang claims that his map is based on one that his grandfather owned and annotated. For some reason, scholars have taken this comment to mean that his grandfather actually drew it. [10] But Huang Zongxi was neither a cartographer nor a publisher. Rather, he owned one of the “complete maps” that were widely popular among 17th-century map collectors, to which he or members of his family added annotations regarding changes in place names subsequent to the Manchu occupation of China in 1644. Just as it is a mistake to treat Huang Qianren’s map as a copy of his grandfather’s, so it would be simplistic to attribute the 1814 map to Huang Qianren. The reason for this is that the two maps differ in design. The 1767 map is a square measuring roughly 107 cm (42 in) on each side. The 1814 map, on the other hand, is a rectangle measuring 142 cm x 240 cm, which changes the aspect ratio (width to height) from 1:1 to 7:4. The later map may have borrowed from the earlier, but these are two different maps. [11] Claiming Huang Qianren as the designer of the map is less a factual claim than the publisher’s bid to attach high-class authority to his product.

To judge from the number of editions and surviving copies, the Complete Map of the Qing Great State was a commercial success. That success in turn implies a large and avid readership who wanted copies of the map. No-one who acquired the map has left any record of why they liked it or how they used it, but the scroll format suggests that they bought the map to hang on the wall. This preference could in turn indicate that the map was acquired not to display accurate information about the world, but to decorate a room in way that celebrated the realm.

Although the Complete Map of the Qing Great State pushes most of the world out to the periphery of the Qing, the practice of abbreviating the world around China’s edges was as old as the “complete map” genre itself. Nor has this version obliterated the traces of Ortelian cartography. Two such traces may be seen in the large blank spaces on the panels at the left and right ends of the set. The image on the leftmost panel stretches west and south from Europe, while the rightmost stretches east from Korea. Both are suggestive of Ortelius’s handling of terra incognita. Consider the left-hand side of the 1598 print of Asiae nova description, “New Description of Asia” (Figure 8). The Mediterranean peeks in at the top corner, the Indian Ocean occupies the bottom, and a relatively empty Africa fills the rest of the space. Now consider the right-hand margin of the 1601 print of Tartariae sive magni chami regni, “Tartary, or the Kingdom of the Great Khan” (Figure 9). This space is filled with an even emptier America. Laid beside the left- and right-hand scrolls of the Complete Map of the Qing Great State, the visual similarity feels more than random. What is proposed is not that the designer copied Ortelius. Rather, he made free use of formal devices of European mapmaking to help him manage the world beyond China.

Figure 8. Ortelius, “New Description of Asia” (1570, 1598), juxtaposed with the left- hand panel of “Complete Map of the Qing Great State.”

Figure 9. Ortelius, “Tartary, or the Kingdom of the Great Khan” (1570, 1601), juxtaposed with the right-hand panel of the “Complete Map of the Qing Great State.”

Revising the “complete map” of the Ming as a Qing map of the world belongs to a time when the Qing did not yet perceive itself to be under serious threat from the West. The rest of the world could be downgraded to peripheral status and the zones to the east and west of China could be reduced to blanks. Even as this was being done, however, Africa, Europe, and America lurked at the margins, underrecognized and almost unnamed. However prominently the Complete Map of the Qing Great State showcased the imperial realm, the Qing was never alone in the world. So too, however great the distance between the map in the Brown library and its Ortelian progenitor, the map was not alone. It was part of a historical process that mutually generated the map of the world we recognize today.

Endnotes

 [1] The blue map survives in at least two versions, one retaining the original name, the other switching out tianxia, “all under Heaven,” for dili, “geography.” For the tianxia edition of the blue map, see Walter Davis, All Under Heaven: The Chinese World in Maps, Pictures, and Texts from the Collection of Floyd Sully (Edmonton: University of Alberta Libraries, 2013), 24-27.

[2] The blue map is widely assigned the date of 1811, though no copy I have seen bears that date. Indirectly supporting the 1823 date is a blue intaglio map of the night sky dated 1822, Huntian yitong xingxiang quantu [Complete Map of the Astral Phenomena that Heaven Unifies], which may have been produced as a pair with the blue map. See “Story Time,” Antique Trade Gazette (26 October 2019): https://www.crouchrarebooks.com/discover/news/story-time.

[3] The other extant copy of the 1814 edition was sold by the map dealer Daniel Crouch; see https://www.frieze.com/gallery/daniel-crouch-rare-books.

[4] On Ricci’s map as a product of contact rather than imposition, see Qiong Zhang, Making the New World Their Own: Chinese Encounters with Jesuit Science in the Age of Discovery (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 45-56, 85-87.

[5] Timothy Brook, Completing the Map of the World: Cartographic Interaction between China and Europe (Taipei: Institute for Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2020), 43-55.

[6] Timothy Brook, Great State: China and the World (New York: HarperCollins, 2020), 5-7, 372- 373.

[7] Timothy Brook, Michael van Walt van Praag, and Miek Boltjes, eds., Sacred Mandates: International Relations in Inner and East Asia since Chinggis Khan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 49-54.

[8] Timothy Brook, “Great States,” The Journal of Asian Studies 75:4 (November 2016), 957-972.

[9] The Capital Library in Beijing holds two copies of Huang Qianren’s map plus a hand-painted copy dated 1800 and a later print; see Yutu yaolu: Beijing tushuguan cang 6827 zhong zhongwaiwen gujiu ditu mulu 輿圖要錄: 北京圖書館藏6827 種中外文故舊地圖目錄 [Concise notices of chariot-maps: a catalogue of 6,827 old Chinese- and foreign-language maps in the Beijing Library] (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan chubanshe, 1999), 40-41. An incomplete reproduction of the copy dated 1800 appears in Ping Yan, China in Ancient and Modern Maps (London: Sotheby’s, 1998), 220-221.

[10] E.g., R. A. Pegg, Cartographic Traditions in East Asian Maps (Hawai'i: Maclean Collection and University of Hawai'i Press, 2014), 18-27. The fullest argument for Huang Zongxi’s authorship (dated to 673) appears in Bao Guoqiang 鮑國強, “Qing Qianlong ‘Da Qing wannian yitong tianxia quantu’ banben bianxi” 清乾隆大清萬年一統天下全圖版本辨析 [Analysis of editions of the Qianlong-era “Complete Map of all under Heaven as unified for ten thousand years by the Qing Great State”], Wenjin liushang 36 文津流觴十週年紀念(總第36 期 ), 44-49.

[11] That borrowing may be detected in the careful depiction of Mongol Banner territories beyond the Great Wall, which are not attested on any other “complete map.” On the mapping of the Mongol Banners, see Anne-Sophie Pratte, “Mapping Qing Mongolia in the 19th Century: Cartography and the Transformation of the Steppe” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2021).

Figure 1. Da Qing wannian yitong tianxia quantu (Complete map of all under Heaven as unified by the Qing Great State for ten thousand years); Brown University.

Figure 2. Relief print of the Complete Map of the Qing Great State in the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005060/.

Figure 3. Intaglio print of the Complete Map of the Qing Great State called the “blue map,” in the Harvard-Yenching Library: https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005018/.

Figure 4. Ortelius, “Image of the Sphere of the Earth” from his Theatre of the Sphere of the Earth (Theatrum orbis terrarum), 1570; courtesy of Utrecht University Library.

Figure 5. Matteo Ricci, Yudi shanhai quantu (Complete map of the mountains and oceans of the earth), as printed by Zhang Huang in his encyclopedia, Tushu bian (The documentarium), 1613; courtesy of Harvard University Library.

Figure 6. Matteo Ricci, Kunyu wanguo quantu (Complete map of the ten thousand countries of the earth), Beijing, 1602.

Figure 7. Cao Junyi, Tianxia jiubian fenye renji lucheng quantu (Complete map of the astral correspondences, human vestiges, and routes of all under Heaven and the nine border zones” (1644), courtesy of the British Library.

Figure 8. Ortelius, “New Description of Asia” (1570, 1598), juxtaposed with the left- hand panel of “Complete Map of the Qing Great State.”

Figure 9. Ortelius, “Tartary, or the Kingdom of the Great Khan” (1570, 1601), juxtaposed with the right-hand panel of the “Complete Map of the Qing Great State.”