The AP has stirred my inner map geek at exactly the right time. A million-dollar map is on rare public display:
The map created by Matteo Ricci was the first in Chinese to show the Americas. Ricci, a Jesuit missionary from Italy, was among the first Westerners to live in what is now Beijing in the early 1600s. Known for introducing Western science to China, Ricci created the map in 1602 at the request of Emperor Wanli.
Ricci’s map includes pictures and annotations describing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world’s highest mountain and longest river. The brief description of North America mentions “humped oxen” or bison, wild horses and a region named “Ka-na-ta.”
Maps like this tell us a lot more about the makers than the world they mapped. This was an era when cartography was only beginning to resemble what we’d call a “science.” This is a European doing his best to describe the shape of the world to the Emperor of China; that Florida is prominently “the land of flowers” tells us the missionary understood his audience.
In order to give His Imperial Majesty the most effective view of the world, Ricci put China at the center — which makes it look smaller. To the Chinese dynasties of that time, the world outside China was unknown and therefore unmapped:
The message hiding in this map is that China was not the center of the world, or even the largest or most important state; that vast lands were still barely explored and filled with wonder. That the world surrounded Wanli. Based on the best work of Spaniards, Portuguese, and Venetians, it was a picture of expansion and limits at the same time.
China’s regime spent the next four centuries dealing with all the changes this map would see. Their faith in barriers and oceans proved misguided and shortsighted — a lesson for a more modern, American civilization that was hardly imagined yet, but still a lesson China hasn’t learned. The communist party has gone from the failed “Green Dam” censorship project, a kind of Great Wall of Technology, to a confrontation with Google in less than a year.
