1 The Role of Colours in Korea’s Cartographic Tradition
In August 2021 the exhibition “Colour meets map” was opened in the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg. In the centre of the exhibition hall, a giant map of Korea consisting of numerous sections was installed in a large historical glass pavilion: the Daedongnyeojido
![The Daedongnyeojido 大東輿地圖 or “Territorial Map of the Great East [Korea]” on display in the exhibition “Colour meets map” in the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg.](/skin/82152816f5cb7b077e8cfd29ed3925b268a0a7f9/img/Blank.svg)
The Daedongnyeojido 大東輿地圖 or “Territorial Map of the Great East [Korea]” on display in the exhibition “Colour meets map” in the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg.
© Museum am Rothenbaum (MARKK), Hamburg, Photography Paul Schimweg
Korea has a tradition of mapmaking that extends back to the Three Kingdoms Period (57 BCE–668 CE). As an important means of understanding the state’s territory, and a necessary tool for state government, maps were also produced and used in the Unified Silla Period (668–936) and the Goryeo Dynasty (936–1392). Records of maps appear in the Samguksagi
Not long after Joseon was established, a world map came to be produced: the Kangnido (short for Honilgangni yeokdaegukdojido
Maps of Korea after the Kangnido are usually classified into four groups: (1) the fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth century maps made in Jeong Cheok
The colours on many maps were based on the same colour scheme6 all over East Asia, including Korean maps. The colours given to the topographical elements relate in most cases to the natural appearance of these elements. The sea and rivers are usually green or blue. The most distinctive characteristic of Korean maps is the strong visual representation of mountains, showing the special physical and spiritual relationship that Korean people have with their mountains.7 These mountains were usually coloured in blue, green and brownish tones, but sometimes also left uncoloured. Other features and lettering were drawn in black. We often find similar colours used for the same purposes on Korean maps: red was used for cities, military-related features, roads and some settlements.
Administrative information on East Asian maps was coded using geometric shapes, the additional application of colours played different roles in the different regions.8 Korean mapmakers developed a complex combination of text and image to demarcate different administrative bodies: coloured circles (or other shapes like ovals and squares) were used for administrative units, with name, type and the largest place name often written inside the circle. The place’s status was indicated immediately to the right of the shape. Not all place signs had to be abstract. Some functions were indicated pictorially – such as houses, temples and walled enclosures – and illustrated in naturalistic or schematic style, and may be coloured.
The Chinese five elements colour theory or ohaeng (Chin. wuxing
Particularly from the eighteenth century on, the production of maps in Korea saw a massive boom. Among the most popular and most used formats in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were so-called hand atlases.13 Although for the colouring of the maps in these atlases only a few colours were used on most of the maps (in many cases just red and blue, in other cases yellow was added as well), the mapmakers found methods to convey a great bandwidth of information by skilfully combining the colours. For example, on province maps the names of the different administrative units are often given in rounded or rectangular frames. These cartouches (mostly including important information, such as the administrative rank, the distance of the place to the capital Seoul, etc.) were normally outlined in red. All Korean provinces were divided into two sectors with regard to military administration. On some maps the division into a “right” (
Next to these standardized atlases, town and county maps as well as military maps were made by a great variety of local hands in different styles. Since the background of most local mapmakers was more in painting and drawing than in cartography, the results are evident in hundreds of local maps in the style of bird’s-eye view landscapes. Thus, it is not surprising that their colouring follows the principles of landscape painting and to find the same colourants generally used in traditional painting applied to these maps.14
This explains why not much has been written about the processes of map colouring and the role of the colourist in East Asia per se. The presumption is that professional map colourists did not exist. The colouring of manuscript maps was almost certainly done by the mapmakers themselves. The colouring of printed maps seems to have been executed by different groups of people, such as painters and untrained workers. No colouring manuals for maps comparable to those in Europe could be found for East Asia and colouring instructions by the mapmakers have only survived for a few Korean maps. One of them is attributed to the scholar and cartographer Jeong Sang-gi
The uniform colour systems, colour schemes and colour codes suggests that they were not developed individually by their makers (and colourists) but followed fixed rules. The signs used on many Korean maps are generally treated as self-explanatory and it was rather unusual to provide a legend to standardized signs. Taking these aspects into consideration, it might be possible that the use of specific colours for the colouring of maps and the respective rules had been internalized to a very great extent by mapmakers (and colourists).
Extract of the Daedongnyeojido, by Kim Jeong-ho, 1861.
© National Museum of Korea
The colouring of maps in Europe and East Asia has gone through very different phases, in particular from the seventeenth century onwards. While publishing houses played a significant role in the development of colouring European maps,18 the colouring of maps in East Asia experienced less change over that period. Although it is not yet clear when exactly colours became functional on Chinese, Korean and Japanese maps, the use of colours (and signs) on maps in East Asia was standardized at an earlier date than in Europe. The most significant changes to the colouring of East Asia maps occurred with two developments: (1) the introduction of European maps in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Jesuit missionaries in China19 and (2) the import of artificial colourants and their recipes (such as Prussian blue) from Europe to China from the eighteenth century onwards. However, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries China, Japan and Korea did not accept many new European ideas and preferred to create maps maintaining their own visual traditions.20
The outward appearance of the maps in East Asia only changed step by step towards a more European style in the second half of the nineteenth century – including the style of colouring and use of colours. The most striking change in this context was the beginning of the full- colouring of land and non-colouring of the sea and rivers. In particular, the different administrative units on Japanese, Chinese and Korean maps were distinguished by full-colouring of the respective areas. The adaption of this colour system started in Japan in the seventeenth century,21 followed by China in the eighteenth century.22 Korea was less sensitive to European ideas, the full-colouring of land areas to distinguish administrative units did not appear on Korean maps before the nineteenth century.23
2 Kim Jeong-ho and the Daedongnyeojido: Key Data
In the eighteenth century, the governmental official Shin Gyeong-jun
The technique of printing maps from woodblocks reached a high level of excellence in Korea and is well documented for the Daedongnyeojido.25 It was printed in 1861 and is the largest map of the entire Korean peninsula known. It is 6.7 metres high and 3.8 metres wide and orientated to the north. It was made easy to carry and to peruse compared to its size. Dividing the Korean peninsula into 22 layers at 120 ri (about 48 km) intervals on the south-north axis and 80 ri (about 32 km) intervals on the east west axis, Kim Jeong-ho made each layer into a folding album. In doing so, he had resolved the shortcomings of large maps.
Around fifty prints were made from the woodblocks in 1861, a second revised version of the woodblocks was produced – the “1864 (gabja year in the sexagenary cycle) edition” – including the corrections of errors in the first “1861 (sinyu year in the sexagenary cycle) edition”.26
Like on many Korean maps, the mountain ranges are strongly visualized on the Daedongnyeojido. Starting from the detailed representation of Mount Paektu on the border between today’s North Korea and China, they run in uninterrupted chains through the entire length of the country. They are depicted largely in stereotypical form, important mountains being larger.
Also, like on many other Korean maps, administrative, military and cultural information on the maps is conveyed through a combination of signs and colours. Altogether Kim used twenty different signs to designate places. A speciality of the Daedongnyeojido is that a legend or jidopyo explaining all the signs utilized on the map are appended to the map. They represented military commands, district seats (name in circle), walls/moats, military stations, post stations, granaries, pasturages, signal fires, royal tombs, small settlements, former district seats, former military stations, former mountain fortresses, and roads (with ticks to indicate 10 ri intervals). In terms of military information, he even marked former military stations and mountain fortresses which were no longer in use. The efficient use of map space enabled Kim to enter over 13,000 geographical designations on the map and much increased the readability of the map.
3 The Colouring of the Daedongnyeojido
Next to the use of different signs, the utilization of colours on the map was another essential tool to increase its readability. As shown in the two thirds of the printed Daedongnyeojido that have survived to the present, Kim obviously made it a rule to apply colours to the woodblock prints. However, it is not recorded who carried out the colouring in which the three primary colours in painting – yellow, red and blue – were applied on the signs, while blue was applied on the sea, rivers and lakes. In the early stage of publishing the Daedongnyeojido, he applied green even on the mountain ranges as shown in a copy of the Daedongnyeojido which is housed at the Sungshin Women’s University Museum (Figure 10.3). Before long, he gave up applying colour on the mountain ranges, because readers could easily recognize the mountain ranges without the colouring. Instead, he persisted in colouring the signs.
Jidopyo (legend) explaining the twenty signs used on Daedongnyeojido (From the collection of the Sungshin Women’s University Museum).
© Sang-hoon Jang
The colouring of the signs became an important and persistent issue in publishing the Daedongnyeojido. For the production of the Cheonggudo
From the collection of the Gyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies.
© Sang-hoon Jang
From the collection of the National Museum of Korea collection.
© Sang-hoon Jang
A drastic change in the colouring of the map is seen on three copies which were thought to be published from 1863 to 1864, when Kim almost finished correcting all the errors which he could find on the maps. These errors included typos and wrong locations and omission of place names, border lines and signs. When he thought that he completed the correction, he changed the name of the edition of the Daedongnyeojido28 from the “1861 sinyu edition” to the “1864 gabja edition”. Thus, the three copies of the Daedongnyeojido that show a totally new colouring system were published right before the appearance of the new 1864 edition.29 In contrast to the early Daedongnyeojido versions, where the land was left uncoloured, a full-colouring of each county was applied on these maps (see Figure 10.6). However, the copies of the later gabja edition of the Daedongnyeojido did not adopt this colouring system any more.
From the collection of the Hwabong Gallery.
© Sang-hoon Jang
Doseongdo 都城圖 (“Map of the walled capital”) from the printed and the manuscript Daedongnyeojido.
© nrich/museum am rothenbaum (markk), hamburg, inv. nr. 12.24:138 and 33.215:16
Similarly to the printed Daedongnyeojido, the colouring of the manuscript versions shows variations in the applied colour scheme and system. For most of the surviving maps, the system of full-colouring the water and leaving the land uncoloured was adopted. However, there also exist late nineteenth century copies where the full-colouring of land was applied, such as the map kept in the Research Institute for Korean Studies.30 As on the printed versions of the Daedongnyeojido, the signs on the manuscript maps were also coloured.
4 The Colourants on the Daedongnyeojido: Two Case Studies from Hamburg
The collection of East Asian maps at the Museum am Rothenbaum, founded in 1871, comprises maps from the regions of China, Japan and Korea from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. A large part of the Korean and Japanese maps is from the Hamburg geologist Carl Christian Gottsche (1855–1909), who acquired the maps at the end of the nineteenth century when he was helping to set up a geological institute at the Imperial University of Japan and was carrying out prospecting work for the Korean King Kojong. He annotated many maps by hand with remarks concerning the contents, the place where the map was published and bought and the price he paid for it. Amongst these maps was a hand-coloured woodblock print of the Daedongnyeojido. Gottsche wrote that he was handed over the map when he left Korea by the previous owner Paul Georg von Möllendorff.31 On a handwritten note added to the woodblock printed version of the Daedongnyeojido, Gottsche stated that fifty prints were made of this map and that the printing blocks were destroyed when French troops began a campaign against Korea.32
Later, manuscript copies were made based on the woodblock printed maps. The Museum am Rothenbaum also keeps one of these manuscript versions from the Korean collection compiled by H.C. Eduard Meyer – one of the founding members of the trading company Meyer & Co., which was active in Asia, and later Imperial Korean consul in Hamburg.33
Both map sets were coloured according to the typical Korean colouring system: water being coloured entirely in blue and land masses left uncoloured, whereby the sea was only coloured where it met the coast. Besides this, both versions were coloured individually and thus greatly differ in their appearance. Like on all Daedongnyeojido copies, the information on the maps is conveyed through a combination of signs and colours. In the manuscript version, names encircled with a red line are district capitals, double lines denote walled cities. In the printed version, the interior of the circles is coloured yellow. Squares with red perimeters show military garrisons, triangular red flame signs are signalling beacons.
Both Daedongnyeojido sets contain maps with city maps of Hanyang, today’s Seoul (Dosengdo
The different external appearance of both map sets can also be explained by the different colourants that were used. According to an analysis of the colourants undertaken in 2020, the Daedongnyeojido woodblock print was coloured using red minium, a yellow organic pigment (probably gamboge), blue indigo and a copper green pigment (since chlorine is present, it could be atacamite). In the manuscript map, in contrast, red vermilion, yellow orpiment (with faint traces of vermilion), as well as Prussian blue blended with white lead were identified. The green coloured elements were coloured using a mixture of Prussian blue and an organic yellow colourant. Prussian blue could be identified on six out of the eleven eighteenth and nineteenth century Korean maps examined at the Museum am Rothenbaum.34 The synthetic pigment Prussian blue was produced for the first time in Europe in 1706 and quickly found its way to Asia. During the nineteenth century Prussian blue replaced step by step the colourants indigo and azurite that were used for the blue elements on Korean maps before that period. The pigment was most probably not imported directly from Europa, but from China, where it has been produced since the early nineteenth century.35 Even though the imported colourant did not affect the content or the representation of Korean maps, it affected the material composition of their colours.
In summary, we can suppose that the use of different colourants for the colouring of both map sets kept in the Museum am Rothenbaum suggests that they may have been coloured at different times or in different places.
5 Conclusion
When Kim Jeong-ho made the Daedongnyeojido he drew up on a whole series of other maps made during a long and fruitful cartographic tradition. In this context he also built on an established practice of colouring maps. Nevertheless, he also broke new ground, making him the most eminent Korean geographer and cartographer of the late Joseon period. The Daedongnyeojido is usually considered as the most significant work of Korean cartography due to three reasons: its unusual size (nearly seven metres long), its accuracy (almost GPS accurate) and its practicability of use (easy to fold and transport). There are further reasons for this.
Like other mapmakers before him, Kim Jeong-ho utilized signs and colours in order to improve the readability of the Daedongnyeojido. However, he was the first Korean cartographer who provided a comprehensive legend for all the (coloured) signs on his map.36 Furthermore, he was the first Korean mapmaker who applied a full-colouring of land to distinguish administrative units – this for the first time for the production of his Cheonggudo in ca. 183437 and later for some copies of the Daedongnyeojido. Colour legends spread increasingly from the early eighteenth century onwards in Europe, where the full-colouring of land to distinguish political units was also a common practice. Although there is no evidence for it, it might be possible that he saw Chinese or Japanese maps which were influenced by the colouring and use of legends of European cartography. Taking into account that the full-colouring of land areas was only applied on three copies, this colour system obviously had no lasting influence at this point in time.
In view of the various colouring of each copy of Daedongnyeojido, Kim does not seem to have provided any fixed instructions for the colourists of the maps. As mentioned above, we do not know if he coloured all the printed maps himself or if other people were involved in the colouring process. On the one hand the colouring might have been conducted at the request of the map users, although it is not very likely that each user himself participated in specifying a certain combination of colours. However, we cannot exclude the colouring being done by the map users in individual cases.
There are many legends surrounding the death of Kim Jeong-ho, who disappeared around 1866, at the same time as most of the printing blocks were destroyed. As a cartographer he was on the one hand strongly connected to the existing traditions, but also open to new developments and influences. For these reasons he broke new ground by making the Daedongnyeojido.
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For the purposes of this paper, East Asia consists of China, Korea and Japan.
Ledyard 1994: 245.
Ledyard 2008.
Ledyard 1994.
A ‘colour system’ can be described as the way a map is painted; that is, which parts are painted. In this connection we can distinguish between full-colouring, spot-colouring, or non-colouring (see also Lange 2022).
In the context of maps, a colour scheme refers to the choice of specific colours for the different elements of the map (see also Lange 2022).
Geomancy (Korean pungsu, Chinese feng shui
For maps, the colour code defines the range of colours selected to convey specific information about the places and features represented on the map (see also Lange 2022).
Green and blue are often considered (two shades of) the same colour in East Asian countries.
The colour yellow also played an important role for the colouring of Royal palaces on Korean maps.
Ledyard 1994: 291–92 and Pegg 2014: 11.
See for example in Sang-hoon Jang et al. 2018: mid-nineteenth century Haejwa Jeondo 海左全圖 (pp. 10–13; https://www.museum.go.kr/site/eng/relic/search/view?relicId=2502), late eighteenth century Comprehensive Geographic Map of [the Country in] the Left [Eastern] Sea [Korea] 海左一統全圖 (pp. 34–35), mid-eighteenth c. Dongguk Daejido/Grand Map of the Eastern Country [Korea] 東國大地圖 (pp. 78–83; https://www.museum.go.kr/site/eng/relic/search/view?relicId=4336).
These atlases, produced in a large variety of designs, catered for the need to show Korea from different perspectives: as part of the world and East Asia, as an overall region and divided into its various provinces. In this respect, they embodied Korea’s perception of itself as an independent nation and at the same time underlined the importance of its relations with its neighbours. For further information on the “atlas production trend” see Dorofeeva-Lichtmann 2019.
Ledyard 1994: 236.
He significantly enhanced the accuracy of Joseon maps by using a new scale in the eighteenth century, the so-called Baek-ri cheok (a “hundred ri units to one” scale). The scale itself was also indicated in the map so that readers could calculate real distances between locations on their own. See Yang 1995: 89.
Joeng Sang-gi’s album was very popular in the late eighteenth century as well as the nineteenth. His son Jeong Hang-ryeong 鄭恒齡 (1710–1770) and grandson Jeong Weon-rim 鄭元霖 (1731–ca. 1800) continued the family’s cartography business, and their efforts paved the way for the future accomplishments of Shin Gyeong-jun and Kim Jeong-ho (Oh 2015: 263).
Ledyard 1994: 307–9.
For a detailed discussion of this issue see van der Linde 2020 and Lange and van der Linde 2021.
With the arrival of European missionaries in the late sixteenth century, Jesuits added to the geographical knowledge that the Chinese already had at that time. With the help of the Chinese converts, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) produced different versions of a Chinese mappa mundi. The Kun yu wanguo quan tu
See also Pegg 2014: 12.
The earliest full-colouring of provinces of Japan can be found on the 1686 Honchō zukan kōmoku
See for example the late nineteenth century Guangdong quan sheng shuilu yu tu
This statement is based on Diana Lange’s study of numerous East Asian maps kept in store in the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg and on publications on collections of such maps kept in different institutions worldwide (such as the British Library, the Library of Congress, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the National Museum and National Library of Korea and the Palace Museum in Beijing), see for example Han’guk Kojidojip P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe 2012; Jang et al. 2018; Lin and Zhang 2013; Wigen, Sugimoto and Karacas 2016; Xie and Chen 2018; Xie and Lin 2015. For a detailed account of the research results see Lange and Hahn 2023.
Oh 2015: 263.
National Museum of Korea 2007.
Jang 2008: 269.
1861 = sinyu year, 1864 = gabja year in the sexagenary cycle – a cycle of sixty years that was historically used for recording time in East Asia.
Jang 2008: 269. The three maps are kept in the Hwabong Museum in Seoul, in the Wisconsin-Milwaukee University (AGS Library) and in the Harvard University Yenching Library. They were also published in Han’guk Kojidojip P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe 2012: 353–55.
This map was published in Han’guk Kojidojip P’yŏnch’an Wiwŏnhoe 2012: 357.
See Gottsche 1886: 239.
However, Gottsche did not state where this information came from. Thus further research should be undertaken on this issue.
See also Lange and van der Linde 2021: 25–26.
Daedongnyeojido 大東輿地圖, after 1861 (MARKK 33.215:16); Dori-pyo 道里標, 1820s (MARKK 12.24:39); Jeolla-do
See also the paper on the Blue maps of China by Elke Papelitzky and Richard Pegg in this volume.
The cartographer Yun Duseo (1668–1715) provided a very brief legend for his Donguk yeojido 東國輿地之圖 made in the 1710 (see Jang et al. 2018: 33).
It is not certain that the full-colouring system was applied exactly in 1834, because there are at least four versions of the Cheonggudo. There is a controversy over which version was made first and last.