Foreword: Maps, Missionaries, and the Global Exchange of Knowledge in the Early Modern World

In: Reimagining the Globe and Cultural Exchange
Author:
M. Antoni J. Ucerler S.J. Director, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History Boston College

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The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History at Boston College is pleased to be able to present this volume to readers interested in the history of cartography as a vehicle of intercultural dialogue and the global exchange of knowledge over the past centuries, with a specific focus on the contribution of missionaries during the early modern and modern periods, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This book is part of our Institute’s monograph series, Studies in the History of Christianity in East Asia, which we are privileged to publish with Brill Academic Publishers in Leiden and Boston. We asked Prof. Laura Hostetler, from the University of Illinois at Chicago, to edit the volume. She had previously served as our EDS-Stewart Chair at the Ricci Institute in 2016, when the Institute was still part of the University of San Francisco; and she was involved in helping the Institute with the various events that we organized around this theme, including an international conference with experts on cartography entitled Reimagining the Globe and Cultural Exchange: From the World Maps of Ricci and Verbiest to Google Earth. We invited a group of scholars from across the world to share their insights about these dynamics of intercultural exchange with a particular focus on cartography.

We regret that it has taken much longer than we had anticipated for this book to appear in print on account of inevitable delays tied to the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic as well as the recent move of the Ricci Institute from San Francisco to Boston. Fortunately, these obstacles have now been overcome. In this foreword, I believe it will be useful to provide some context and to explain some of the ideas that helped to frame and define the contours of this multifaceted project and its related events, while mentioning some aspects of the history of cartography that served as its scholarly inspiration. The resulting volume may not conform completely to what some readers might initially expect from a more technical volume on the history of cartography; but it is our hope that many will find something of interest in the pages that follow and will discover some of the unexpected links between the different topics covered therein.

I should note from the outset that it was not our aim to provide an exhaustive treatment of the topic, but rather to engage in an exploration—from different perspectives—of cartography as a medium for the transmission of knowledge across cultures, continents, and languages, beginning with the early modern period, a time of exploration, navigation, colonization, and Christian missionary activity beyond the shores of Europe. It was also an exciting time marked by the invention of the Gutenberg handpress, a technology that revolutionized the ability to transmit knowledge at a cost that was no longer prohibitive. More specifically, our aim was to explore the specific role played by missionaries in the development of cartography as intermediaries; and how this, in turn, stimulated further cultural interaction and exchange of ideas with the peoples of East Asia. It was most definitely a period marked by the mutual discovery of the “Other”; and perhaps nothing was more concrete than the questions Europeans relate they were asked upon their arrival. We can well imagine that, after the initial query: “Who are you and why did you come here?” what soon followed were questions informed by curiosity: “Where did you come from?,” “How did you get here?,” and “What do your lands look like?” This final question called for detailed descriptions of mountains, rivers, lakes, sea passages, as well as the fauna and flora of different regions.

What soon becomes clear from both a perusal of the written reports as well as the material culture, as expressed in maps, is that knowledge travelled in both directions; and while Europe gained knowledge of Asia, so too East Asian scholars in China, Japan, and Korea gained knowledge of world geography. The fifteenth to eighteenth centuries were a fluid time in terms of cartographic knowledge; and not all cartographers or schools of cartography agreed upon the physical details they were describing, sometimes even debating the contours of entire countries or even continents. The island of Hokkaido in northern Japan, formerly referred to as Ezo (or Yezo), for example, did not appear at all on a European map until the early seventeenth-century manuscript map drawn by the Jesuit missionary, Geronimo De Angelis (1567–1623), who would later die as a martyr in 1623. He was also the first non-Japanese to describe the Tsugaru straits between Honshu and Hokkaido. From his correspondence, we know that he visited Matsumae in northern Japan between 1618 and 1622 and studied the entire region.

Thus, sometimes unwittingly, missionaries ended up exploring places they had never imagined they would see. The result was that they found themselves at new cultural and scientific crossroads, as they traveled to new parts of the world to carry out their primary goal, namely to preach the Christian faith. This is not to say that others were not involved in these explorations. But we have chosen to explore their varied activities and how these led to new knowledge or the exchange thereof. Even a perfunctory study of the European presence in East Asia in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries reveals that they often ended up dominating the scene as unintentional brokers of information. Soon after their arrival in East Asia, Christian missionaries began to engage in the compilation of geographical data, including the actual drafting of localized maps. At first, these were produced primarily with a European audience in mind. But once the Jesuit missionaries established themselves at the Chinese imperial court as scientists, they were also called upon to share their knowledge of the world with their East Asian interlocutors. Thus, the information was not exclusively traveling in one direction; nor was the story of missionary endeavors in East Asia limited simply to describing their work of evangelization or their involvement with the merchants on whose ships they traveled.

The Italian Jesuit, Matteo Ricci (1552–1610), aided by the Chinese literatus, Li Zhizao (1565–1630), undertook the momentous project of creating for the Chinese a map of the entire whole world, with place names of all known countries in their own language. After several earlier attempts, beginning in 1584, the 1602 Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖 or A Complete Map of the Myriad Kingdoms of the Whole World, printed with woodblocks on six large panels, became one of Ricci’s most celebrated achievements. It did not fail to astonish Ricci’s Chinese interlocutors. An early adoption of a Mercator-type projection, it provided detailed visual information about most of the continents. It also included other scientific information regarding various natural phenomena and astronomical data. Many place names transliterated into Chinese characters for the first time by Ricci on his 1602 map are still used to this very day in China, more than four hundred years later. Keen to make this cartographic treasure born of the collaboration between Chinese and European scholars working together available to a wider audience, we set out to borrow one of the rare original copies of this map, which is part of the extensive map collections of the James Ford Bell Library’s collections at the University of Minnesota. We wished to include it as part of an exhibit we proposed to the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. This came to fruition after three years of preparation in the spring of 2016 as part of the Museum’s 50th anniversary celebrations. I co-curated this exhibit with Natasha Reichle of the AAM. But Ricci’s map was not the only map in this exhibition. We thought that it would be more interesting also to display the aforementioned 1674 map created by Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88), namely his Complete Map of the World or Kunyu quantu 坤輿全圖.

Even larger than Ricci’s six-panel mappamondo, Verbiest’s map of the world in two hemispheres, represented stereographically on six large panels, with the Eastern hemisphere on the left, thereby placed China visually close to the center rather than at the edge of the world as the “Far East.” In this respect, Verbiest followed what Ricci had done in his 1602 map. The various cartouches on the additional two outer panels (for a total of eight altogether), provide short treatises in classical Chinese on astronomic phenomena, the tides of the oceans, earthquakes, rivers, and mountains, among other themes. It also includes detailed drawings of animals from various parts of the world unknown to inhabitants of the Middle Kingdom, including, for example, the North American beaver and turkey, as well as the African rhinoceros, referred to by missionaries on some maps as a “sea horse” 海馬 or “cavallo marino” (in Italian manuscripts). There are even mythological creatures, such as a unicorn, a mermaid, and a merman.

During the years when I was teaching history at Georgetown University, I discovered to my surprise that the Library of Congress possessed an original copy of Verbiest’s map on eight scrolls. When we were debating how best to put together a proposal for an exhibit, I approached Ralph Ehrenberg, the former Head of the Geography and Map Division, to see whether we could ask the Library of Congress to authorize the loan of this map. Thanks to his generous efforts, we were able to display the two large Jesuit maps together at the Asian Art Museum. As far as we know, this may well have been the first time in several centuries that the two maps came together for a public exhibit. Other materials were also included in this exhibit entitled: China at the Center: Ricci and Verbiest World Maps. Among these additional artifacts were two large hand-painted portraits of Matteo Ricci and his first convert and colleague, Xu Guangqi 徐光啓 (1562–1633), painted by orphans at the Tushanwan (Tou-sè-we) 土山灣 orphanage painting workshop, within the Zikawei (Xujiahui 徐家匯) Jesuit complex in Shanghai, ca. 1910–1914. These paintings were originally exhibited at the Republic of China pavilion during the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915; and they were once again on exhibit in San Francisco a century thereafter. These artifacts were requested by the newly established government in China following the collapse of the Qing dynasty in 1911.

In conjunction with the exhibit at the Asian Art Museum, the Ricci Institute also sponsored its own exhibit on the campus of the University of San Francisco at the Manresa Gallery of St. Ignatius Church, with early modern European maps that we borrowed from the extensive collections of the Kirishitan Bunko (Christian Archives) of Sophia University in Tokyo. Entitled, Mapping “The East”: Envisioning Asia in the Age of Exploration, we worked with the Art History and Arts Management Program of USF. The exhibit was curated by Prof. Catherine Lusheck and Madeline E. Warner ’15. A second exhibit on the University’s campus was held at the Thacher Gallery. This included the response of two contemporary artists, Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather, through works on wood and paper, to a Japanese version of Ricci’s map produced in 1785 by the Edo scholar, Nagakubo Sekisui 長久保赤水 (1717–1801). This copy was also part of the Thacher Gallery exhibit. Finally, in collaboration with the ¡Sacabuche! Ensemble, two original concerts with a repertoire of early European and Chinese music, were held at St. Ignatius Church in San Francisco and at the Mission Church on the campus of Santa Clara University. These highly original audiovisual performances, centered on Ricci’s 1602 map, retell the story of Ricci’s time in China through images taken from his map, with a narrative script in English and Chinese, edited by Ann Waltner, Professor of Chinese history at the University of Minnesota.

Why then should we make such a fuss over these maps? These unique artifacts represent much more than mere curiosities from a bygone age, inferior to ours in scientific terms. They became so popular in East Asia itself that they were reproduced numerous times not only in China but also in Edo Japan and in Joseon Korea. In fact, they continued to be reprinted, and many were then hand-colored, until the mid-nineteenth century. This is historically significant, as both Japan and Korea in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were not otherwise receptive to Western Learning mediated by Christian missionaries. Official Korean records reveal the interactions between the envoys that the royal Joseon court regularly sent to Beijing and Jesuit missionaries at the Qing court. Among others, Crown Prince Sohyeon (1612–45), returning from his exile as a hostage in Shenyang, met Johann Adam Schall von Bell, Verbiest’s senior colleague, in Beijing in 1644. Korean envoys, such as Jeong Duwon 정두원 (鄭斗源) (1581–?), also speak of their encounters in 1631 with João Rodrigues Tçuzzu (1561/2–1633/34), known as the “Interpreter,” following the latter’s exile from Japan to China in 1614. This encounter is recorded in the Veritable Records of the Joseon Dynasty under the entry for the seventh month, twelfth day (in the lunar calendar) of the ninth year of the reign of King Injo 인조 (仁祖) (1595–1649).

This and other Korean sources explicitly mention, for example, that the envoys acquired and brought back with them copies of Ricci’s 1602 map. It was most probably during this period that the exceedingly rare 1603 reprint of Ricci’s map, with the title, Liangyi xuanlantu 兩儀玄覽圖, or A Mysterious Map of the Two Forms, made its way to Korea. The only known extant copy of this rare treasure is preserved in the Korean Christian Museum at Soongsil University in Seoul. Even the highly conservative Joseon court readily came to recognize the importance of the Ricci map; so much so, that in 1708 the king ordered it to be reproduced anew. Further copies of Verbiest’s 1674 map were also reprinted in Korea until the late nineteenth century, and notably in 1860. But they possessed authority not on account of their “Western” origin, but rather because these Jesuits produced their work as Chinese court scientists. Thus, Joseon scholars respected this knowledge because it had originated in the Middle Kingdom and its text was composed in classical Chinese. What is curious in this regard is initial reluctance on the part of Korea to acknowledge the Qing “barbarians” as legitimate heirs to the “enlightened” Ming throne, whom they had overthrown. These negative perceptions were only confirmed by the second Qing invasion of the Korean peninsula in 1636 that saw the court humiliated and subjugated by the Manchus. What has thus far proven to be unique to Korea are the round world maps, i.e., the Chonhado 천하도 (天下圖) or Map of All under Heaven, which were produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They are of great interest, as they represent a curious hybrid between earlier Chinese Buddhist cosmological maps, which include mythical islands or kingdoms (e.g., the country of women, the country of giants, etc.), and the new knowledge that had been introduced from the West through maps like those of Ricci, Aleni, and Verbiest.

In another historical instance that illustrates the weight given to the cultural authority of China, the Jesuits were commissioned to take part in a larger project, literally to map “all under heaven” or the entire Chinese empire governed by the Qing rulers. This involved the Jesuits’ participation in the Chinese imperial survey, underwritten by the Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722) between 1708 and 1718 with the help of the Jesuits who had been sent to China several decades earlier by Louis XIV. The atlas that they produced was part of the broader portfolio of scientific work that they were engaged in at the imperial court centered primarily around astronomy and calendar reform.

As in the case of Korea, which eventually accepted even the cultural authority of the Qing court, the results of such efforts were keenly followed in other countries beyond the borders of China. In Edo Japan Ricci’s 1602 map was reprinted with woodblocks and hand colored as early as 1604. There were numerous reiterations of this map that continued to be printed for several centuries. What is particularly notable is that this took place despite the ban on Christianity, which had been decreed by the Edo shogunate in 1614. As soon as the Japanese discovered that Christian books or books written by Jesuit missionaries in Classical Chinese were being brought into Japan by Chinese merchants who were coming to trade at Nagasaki, they put an immediate halt to the importation even of scientific works produced by the Jesuit missionaries in China. Having set up an Inspector or Inquisitor for Books (shomotsu aratameyaku 書物改役) as early as 1630, it was sufficient for Ricci’s Chinese name, Li Madou 利瑪竇 (or that of other missionaries) to appear as the author of a work, or even simply to be mentioned in an unrelated work (e.g., a seventeenth-century guidebook of Beijing that happened to mention the Jesuit Church and Ricci tomb as notable sites to visit) for it to be strictly banned. As for the unfortunate Chinese merchants who were wittingly or unwittingly responsible for the importation of such books, they were faced with severe punishment, either death or, if leniency was shown, a permanent ban from ever trading again in Japan.

And yet many copies of Ricci’s world map continued to circulate in various forms throughout the Edo period. In fact, archival research seems to indicate that there are more extant copies of Ricci’s map (or numerous versions thereof, including those by Aleni and Verbiest) produced in Japan than in China itself. We find some of these hand-drawn and colored versions (rather than re-printed with woodblocks) still being copied in the middle of the nineteenth century by curious scholars. Other more elaborate copies were painted directly onto traditional folding screens (byōbu), some of which were even decorated with gold leaf and became collectible works of art. Thus, their aesthetic qualities complemented or even superseded their primary function of transmitting scientific knowledge. Perhaps for some it was their appeal as decorative works of art that lent an air of sophistication to their collectors; and in some cases, this quality may even have been more prized than the actual knowledge conveyed by the cartographic data itself. With regard to the latter, however, Edo scientists were urging the shogunate to ease the rigid ban on the importation of scientific books produced by the missionaries in China, lest they fail in their own task of reforming the Japanese calendar and gaining sufficient up-to-date knowledge about the world. As a result of these entreaties, in 1720, the eighth shogun, Tokugawa Yoshimune (1684–1751), made provisions to allow the purchase in China and reproduction in Japan of such works, with the proviso: “insofar as they did not promote the Christian religion.” This opened the doors to another century of copying, distribution, and study of these treaties and maps.

Of particular interest to Edo scholars was the compilation on world geography or The Record of Foreign Lands or Zhifang Waiji 職方外紀 by the Italian Jesuit, Giulio Aleni (1582–1649), first published in 1623, which included detailed descriptions of different parts of the world interspersed with foldout maps. We find copies of this work preserved in various important archives of the time, including the shogun’s library, the Momijiyama bunko (紅葉山文庫), and the Confucian temple in Edo. First established as the Shinobugaoka Sacred Hall (忍岡聖堂) in 1632 with the support of the head of the Owari branch of the shogun’s family, Tokugawa Yoshinao (1601–50), it was led by the renowned Confucian scholar, Hayashi Razan (1583–1657). His family would be responsible for the government sponsored school of Confucianism in Edo, the Shōheizaka Gakumonjo (昌平坂学問所) or Shōheikō (昌平黌), which was on the grounds of the Confucian temple, which was transferred to Yushima Sacred Hall (湯島聖堂) in 1691. Evidence of the existence of these cartographic treatises in the archives of these institutions reveals a great deal about the importance the shogunate placed on the acquisition of global knowledge. The fact that they had been written by missionaries in China was either forgotten or perhaps no longer considered relevant, for they did not include explicit references to Christianity, and they came from China.

Another influential map in Japan was produced by eighteenth-century Japan’s most distinguished cartographer, Nagakubo Sekisui. As mentioned earlier, he reproduced in 1785 a somewhat simplified version of Ricci’s 1602 map, with names written in both Chinese characters and Japanese kana. He may have also had access to an earlier version of this world map compiled by Ricci in 1584 and 1600. The latter bears the title, Shanhai yudi quantu 山海輿地全圖 or Complete Terrestrial Map. In the preface printed on Sekisui’s map, the Japanese geographer refers to the original cartographer as “Master Li” 利氏 and uses the title of Ricci’s earlier 1600 map while also referring to “six panels that together come to form the complete map,” presumably a reference to Ricci’s 1602 mappamondo. It is almost certain that, by this time, almost no one would have known that “Master Li” had been a foreigner, and a missionary of the banned “Kirishitan” religion. As mentioned earlier, as the map had originally come from Ming China, it had the authority of the Chinese court, which was still considered an important source of accurate scientific information. This version of Sekisui’s map would also be reproduced numerous times, well into the nineteenth century, both in print and as hand-drawn manuscripts.

Missionaries were also a privileged conduit of information about East Asia in general and about its geographical features in particular. Detailed descriptions and drawings were sent to Europe on a regular basis, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century. One of the best-known maps of Japan from this period is the 1595 version produced by Jodocus Hondius (1563–1612), based on the information taken from the work of Luís Teixeira, whose Iaponiae insulae descriptio or Description of the Island of Japan, appeared in Abraham Ortelius’s (1527–98) monumental atlas, Theatrum orbis terrarum or Theatre of the Orb of the World (literally “of the lands”), which was first printed in Antwerp in 1570. These maps went hand in hand with various reports and other treatises that missionaries sent back to Europe recounting their activities and important events that had taken place. The 1595 map of Japan, mentioned earlier, was published during Hideyoshi’s invasion of Joseon Korea, which commenced in 1592. The Spanish Jesuit, Gregorio de Céspedes (1551–1611), accompanied some of the Christian lords fighting for Hideyoshi to Korea as a chaplain of sorts and thereby became an important source of information. In an annual letter from the Japanese mission for 1591 and 1592, published in Rome by Luigi Zannetti, we find one of the first European references to “Il Regno di Corai” or the “Kingdom of Korea.” For an earlier reference, we must look to a handwritten report (composed ca. 1580) on China written in Latin by Alessandro Valignano (1539–1606), the Visitor of the Jesuit Superior General for the missions of India and East Asia. He includes a short paragraph on “the kingdom of Korea” or De regno Coreae. It was thus during the late sixteenth century that reports about Joseon Korea became available for the first time to European readers.

The thirst for accurate scientific knowledge had the surprising effect of breaking down ideological and confessional divides that otherwise seemed insuperable. When the Italian Jesuit missionary in China, Martino Martini (1614–61), made his way back to Europe to solicit funds and men for the Chinese mission, he brought back with him an elaborate set of maps, which would become the source for the first complete atlas of China, the Novus atlas sinensis or New Chinese Atlas, printed in Europe. It is noteworthy that his atlas was printed not in Rome, Madrid, or Lisbon, but in Amsterdam in 1655 by the famous Dutch printer, Joan Blaeu (1596–1673). This was true of other maps as well, including those of Japan by Jodocus Hondius (1563–1612) and Willem Janszoon Blaeu (1571–1638). Yet another example is a 17th-century Danish map of Tartary, i.e., Kort over det ostlige Tartari til den almindelige Reise beskrivelse af Jesuiternes Kort or A Map of Eastern Tartary with a General Description of Travel of the Jesuit Map, which makes explicit reference to its source as the Jesuit maps or Jesuiternes Kort written between 1708 and 1715, the very years the Jesuits were engaged in the aforementioned imperial survey of all of China. This is highly significant, as it reveals the extent to which the res publica litterarum was able to overcome such ideological and/or specifically confessional conflicts in the common pursuit of reliable knowledge about the world—a world that seemed to expand and change its contours with each new geographical discovery. It appears that the same dynamic can account for the reaction of scholars in Edo Japan, who took risks to put knowledge of the world and science ahead of political orthodoxy.

Another curious feature of these early maps that merits further exploration is how secondary information was transmitted via these maps. A good case in point is Jodocus Hondius’s 1606 Map of China. While this map is primarily, as indicated by its title, a map of China, it includes a colorful cartouche showing the execution of the first twenty-six Christians by crucifixion on Nishizaka Hill in Nagasaki on February 5, 1597. This involved being stabbed to death with two long swords or naginata, while placed on a wooden cross with arms, neck, and legs fastened firmly to the wood with metal clamps. This information was taken directly from Jesuit and Franciscan reports sent from Japan and published in Europe shortly after the fateful event. In fact, even a summary perusal of reports from this period on the Japanese missions published in Europe in various languages reveals a wealth of editions in various languages that recount this fateful event. Yet another source of information were various engravings that depicted this martyrdom. One notable example is a broad sheet with an engraving with text, including the names of all twenty-six martyrs, published in Augsburg in 1628 by Wolfgang Kilian (1581–1663), a prominent engraver, publisher, and cartographer.

This event was considered of such importance to all of Christendom that Hondius felt compelled to include this new information from those regions on his map of China. In fact, this map was printed just nine years after this martyrdom in Japan. Hence, one might even say that maps sometimes functioned almost like modern websites, with hyperlinks, which provided the curious observer with the “breaking news” of the day. And just as one newspaper or tv channel will carry information first reported by another news outlet, so too this map, and the information it contained, was deemed too important to relegate to a single edition, published by a single cartographer in a particular country and only in one language. Hence, the English cartographer, John Speed (1552?–1629), would produce his own map of China in 1626 and include his own cartouche of this martyrdom with the English caption, “the [i.e., Japanese] manner of execution.” At times these captions would be faithful translations of previous editions, whereas in other cases the text was edited, abbreviated, or lengthened according to what the publisher thought most appropriate for the target audience. For good measure, on both sides of the map Speed also includes a pictographic representation in color of “a solider of Japan,” armed with an arquebus (first introduced to Japan in 1543) and a sword.

What these examples suggest is that there was not always a clear line of demarcation between professions, and that the producers of these maps could comfortably wear several hats at the same time. An engraver might also work on maps, while cartographers would be consuming and possibly producing other textual and pictographic media, all the while incorporating that data into the final version of their maps. The same held true for the works of Jesuit missionaries, including those by Giulio Aleni and Ferdinand Verbiest, where the distinctions between ethnographic treatises, complementary illustrations, and cartography proper were sometimes not as explicit as they would become in later centuries. The Flora sinensis or Chinese Flora, an illustrated book compiled by the Polish Jesuit, Michał Boym (1612–59), and printed in Vienna in 1656, is a good case in point. It visually represented the fauna and flora of different parts of the world and was an important extension of his own cartographic endeavors. He had produced three notable maps of China; but then, almost as if he were zooming into that region on Google Earth, as we can do today, he felt the need to provide his readers with a more localized and—literally—specific “picture” of the country’s defining features. Hence, we may even speak of an “intertextuality” between maps and other printed and manuscript textual sources produced by the missionaries that complemented, elucidated, or otherwise provided further information about peoples and places. It is also important to note that the hand coloring of these maps or ethnographic treatises added to their visual impact and enhanced their value as desirable objects for purchase.

Their function was not only to convey knowledge but also to produce a desired visual rhetorical effect that would elicit its own emotional response. For Catholic Europe, these maps were sometimes viewed as a rebuttal to Protestant claims that the Roman Catholic Church was no longer the true Church. Rome would claim that missionary expansion was a clear sign of a vibrant Church in line with the ideal of the return to the primitive Church of the apostles—often cited as an ideal by Reformers. And this expansion was demonstrated by maps clearly indicating all the places where the Roman Catholic Church had newly preached the Gospel. A striking example is the Iaponiae nova et accurata descriptio by António Francisco Cardim (1596–1659), based on an early 1641 version by Bernardino Ginnaro. In the case of Cardim, he included it in his book on Christian martyrs in Japan, Fasciculus e Iapponicis floribus, suo adhuc madentibus sanguine or A Bundle of Japanese Flowers, still moist with the Blood (of the Martyrs), printed in Rome in 1646.

In these and many other cases, we can identify clear visual references, or what we might term “inter-visual” or “inter-objective” cross references between different maps. We find, for example, Willem Janszoon Blaeu including numerous cartouches representing different men and women of countries in East and Southeast Asia, together with smaller representations of major cities in Asia, in his Asia noviter delineata, which was reprinted numerous times in the seventeenth century, following its first issue in 1630. Far from considering such copying or borrowing of texts and images as plagiarism, reproducing details from earlier maps could lend them even greater authority. Imitation conferred approval and acceptance of previously transmitted data. And for those who were still new to their trade, copying could also be a safe practice, as their work appeared to rely on accepted knowledge. Nevertheless, this imitation did not always have the intended effect. A good case in point is the depiction of both the Korean and Californian peninsulas as islands. Curiously, Matteo Ricci’s famous world map of 1602 correctly shows California as a peninsula, whilst his fellow Jesuit, Ferdinand Verbiest, when creating his own monumental world map more than a generation later in 1674, reverted to drawing California as an island. In the latter case, i.e., of California, the issue would not be definitely resolved until the overland exploration by Eusebio Kino (1645–1711) between 1698 and 1701—an expedition that would finally provide irrefutable evidence that California was in fact a peninsula. Kino’s map notwithstanding, it would take almost another half a century for the “island theory” to be definitively abandoned.

Similar uncertainty plagued the geographical status of Korea until the publication of maps in the eighteenth century, including Jacques Nicolas Bellin’s (1703–72) China nebst Corea und den benachbarten Laendern der Tartary aus denen Karten genommen, welche die Jesuiten von dem Jahre 1708 bis 1717 davon entworfen haben or China together with Korea, and the neighboring countries of Tartary, taken from the maps which the Jesuits have drawn of it from the year 1708 to 1717, printed in Leipzig in 1749. This map explicitly refers to the Kangxi imperial survey with which the Jesuits were involved. Regardless of whether they were correct or committed blunders when drawing their maps, before the advent of modern techniques of surveying, which improved exponentially in the eighteenth century, not to mention our contemporary recourse to satellite imagery, we are often confronted with different “schools of cartography.” Each presented data as a matter of received opinion or what they judged as the most reliable and verifiable knowledge for their own time, even if others argued the contrary (e.g., land being an island or a peninsula). In such cases where there was disagreement, the obvious risk for the early modern cartographer was copying what would turn out to be the wrong representation.

To sum up, the early modern age was a time when important developments in the history of cartography took place that would forever transform—both in Europe and in East Asia—the perception and understanding of our physical world and of its inhabitants across continents. Europeans had no idea where the mythical “Zipangu” or “Cyampagu,” which Marco Polo had referred to in his famous travelogue, was located until the Portuguese washed up on the shores of Japan in 1543. Soon they began to send back information confirming both its existence, location, and geographical contours. On the other hand, the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, were astonished to lay eyes on Ricci’s map and reimagine a world with entire continents well beyond the Middle Kingdom and the countries in its immediate vicinity. That said, as the scholar of Chinese history, Timothy Brook, has demonstrated, the Selden map preserved in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, reveals that Chinese merchants were independently mapping detailed commercial routes to numerous parts of both Southeast and South Asia. Thus, while the missionaries were certainly not the exclusive conduit of information regarding cartography, it goes without saying that they played a crucial historical role both in the actual transmission of knowledge and the material production of it, whether it involved the preparation of woodblocks in China or arranging the publication of these maps with cartographers and printing houses in Europe. These are limited examples of some of the trajectories that we chose to explore during our international symposium at the University of San Francisco in 2016. It is our sincere hope that this volume on cartography will allow our readers to embark on their own journeys of discovery of new places, all the while attentive to the visually embedded stories that these maps reveal to us about the intercultural encounters of centuries past.

M. Antoni J. Ucerler, S.J.

Director, Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History

Boston College, April 2023

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