The first European map of China faintly relied on the copy of a Chinese original, obtained through bribing and espionage; the last covered in this book was the result of the largest land survey ever made until that time. These two and another 125 maps depict, sometimes uniquely, sometimes copying each other, a country whose images were so different that it was hard to understand which to trust.
This study reproduces and describes, for the first time, all the maps of China printed in Europe between 1584 and 1735, unravelling the origin of each individual map, their different printing, issues and publication dates. It also tells, for each, the unique story that made possible these visions from another world, stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity and greed.
For a presentation from the author related to the publication entitled China on Copper Plates: The First 150 Years of Chinese Maps in Western Prints (1584-1735), see: here.
A summary:
On June 23, 2022, the fourth session of the academic lecture series on "The Weavers of Four-Dimensional Space-Time and Their Creation" on the History of Maps was held in the form of an online seminar at the Kuang-Chi International Scholars Center. Dr. Marco Caboara, an Italian scholar from the Lee Shau Kee Library of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, gave a lively presentation entitled "China on Copperplate - the First 150 Years of Western Printed Maps of China, 1584-1735". The lecture was conducted in both Chinese and English. Associate Professor Lin Hong from the School of Humanities of Shanghai Normal University served as the moderator and translator. Dr. Yang Xunling, Deputy Director of the Library of Macau University of Science and Technology, served as the main responder. Professor Huang Yijun of Minzu University of China, and Deputy Youth Associate of Fudan University Researcher Ding Yannan, Dr. Catarina Batista and Dr. Ângela Gil from the Library of Macau University of Science and Technology, and Dr. Zheng Man from the Free University of Berlin participated in the discussion. Many domestic and foreign scholars and map enthusiasts listened to the lecture online. The lecture lasted nearly three hours.
Marco Caboara, Ph.D. (2011), University of Washington, Seattle, is the Head of Special Collections at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library. He has published articles on Classical Chinese bamboo manuscripts and on the Jesuit Cartography of China.
"Today, Regnum Chinae – The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735, by Marco Caboara, a senior lecturer in the History of Cartography and the History of Science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, offers reproductions of every known European map of China from 1584 up to the Kangxi survey, 127 of them published together for the first time in a sumptuous single volume of coffee-table-challenging weight. These maps do much more than indicate a route from A to B; they describe political boundaries, place Chinese empires in their relationship to neighbouring powers and inspire dreamers as they always do." – Peter Neville-Hadley, in: Post Magazine (March 2024), p. 16
"This book will be an indispensable addition to the library of all institutional and private collectors of maps of China and will also appeal to anyone interested in the cartography of East and Southeast Asia." – Peter Geldart, in: IMCOS 173 (June 2023), p. 56
"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. […]Regnum Chinae is a masterpiece of erudition and a tribute to those mapmakers, publishers, printers, book dealers, and those who passed along information." – Juan José Morales, in: Asian Review of Books (March 2023)
"This volume represents a significant milestone in the history of European cartography of China. […] Caboara’s methodology of tracing “map groups” (19–26) is worthy of imitation by students of the history of cartography. [...] Caboara’s work will be the starting point for anyone interested in studying key moments [...] in the intertwined development of Chinese and European cartography". – Robert Batchelor, in: Journal of Jesuit Studies 10.4 (2023)
Historians of Cartography and of contacts between China and the West, map collectors, map dealers, map librarians and map enthusiasts, book and print historians.