5 ms·

Early Chinese World Maps (2010)

112 points by benbreen 7y ago

larnmar 7y ago
Interesting but not as remarkable as the author seems to think, and certainly the New World parts of the maps are copied from European maps rather than being the result of independent and previously unknown exploration. The “island of California” was a mistake in much earlier maps, which got corrected in the late 16th century and then managed to sneak back into maps again in 1622. Australia is a bit more interesting — Dirk Hartog had mapped the west coast in some detail just four years previously, though none of the detail makes it in here. Torres and Janszoon had also spotted the northern coast but not mapped it in much detail. The map is also remarkable as much for what it’s missing as what it has. A pretty good depiction of the Gulf of Mexico, but Indonesia is a bunch of random blobs, and... just one island of Japan?
- jacobolus 7y ago
  If you look at a large number of historical maps, you’ll notice that each mapmaker / each country had their own errors (sometimes trivial spelling mistakes, or pairs of cities with the labels swapped, other times comically wrong coastlines or even stuff like California-as-an-island) which persisted for centuries after corrections had been made in maps from other makers. If you compare the errors you can figure out pretty easily which previous map “lineage” was used as the basis for any particular map.
bigpumpkin 7y ago
On the "Map of the Myriad Countries of the World" (1602 AD) bears a description near Europe: "The continent of Europe has over thirty countries. All implement the laws of the past sovereigns. No heterodox doctrines are followed. They only believe in the Lord of the Heaven, the Emperor on High, and the doctrines of the ancient sage kings." [1] [1]https://books.google.com/books?id=c9G6Eeh-CMgC&pg=PA253&lpg=PA253#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=c9G6Eeh-CMgC&pg=PA253&lpg=...
- rsynnott 7y ago
  That was ~accurate at the time; that period was more or less peak religious suppression in most of Europe.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    It is accurate in one sense and highly misleading in another. Check out the Google Books link. A Chinese bureaucrat reading that description would have imagined entirely different "past sovereigns" (Chinese ones) and "heterodox doctrines" (differing from mainstream Chinese philosophy). By equivocating between established concepts and Christian ones, the Jesuits displayed Christianity as much less of a foreign ideology than it actually was.
ngcc_hk 7y ago
Frightened me a bit as the chinese like to claim ... but this is more early world map in chinese not chinese world map. It is just some foreigner mapped world plus some translation. This is different from the chinese sky map where the observation may be foreigner but the idea is chinese. In fact all the first round chinese catholic got killed due to the observation not marched the chinese cosmology (based on 5 elements). Here really just translation.
dwohnitmok 7y ago
One thing I've always found fascinating about Matteo Ricci's maps, is that he is almost certainly personally the direct source of a few names of foreign (to China) lands that have persisted into modern Chinese. That is his translation dictated how future generations would call those lands. Two major examples are Europe (欧罗巴) and Asia (亚细亚). The article also points out Canada (加拿大). It's not too often that you're able to trace the etymology of widespread words removed by several centuries to a single person (the major exception for English of course being Shakespeare).
- lordgrenville 7y ago
  I read recently (don't recall the source) that Shakespeare may not have coined many of the words attributed to him, but is just the earliest known source, since we have maintained much more of his writing than that of his contemporaries or predecessors.
- carlob 7y ago
  Matteo Ricci is also known for being one of the pioneers of mnemonics. Some of the techniques he employed were known in the middle ages before printed books (in the West), but he wrote one of the first treatises on mnemonics. A Jesuit once told this was because he wasn't allowed to bring books into China and so he had to memorize everything, but I can't find confirmation of this claim.
- hmwhy 7y ago
  It may be true that many the Chinese names for those lands are the same, or at least very similar, to those used in Ricci's maps; but, suppose you could remove all existing knowledge about what those lands are called in the Chinese language and ask well-educated Chinese speakers to name them base on their Italian (or whatever more appropriate) names, I think people will still come up with very similar names. The reason is because many foreign words are translated according to how they sound, so phonetic (?) requirements already substantially limit the possible choice of characters. Since most (every?) character in Chinese has a meaning, I think people generally prefer choosing characters that have neutral to positive meanings, characters that can be put together to form a word or phrase, and/or those that have meanings associated with the actual word being translated. I think historically there are also "preferred characters" (maybe there is even an unofficial guideline for writers/translators?) when it comes to translating foreign words into Chinese, for example 巴 (bā) is often used for sounds like "ba" or "pa". Some examples of this are the one you have given for Europe (although I think it was likely the "pa" in Europa instead of Europe); Paris (巴黎); and bus (巴士). The same, I think, can be said for most of the characters in the examples you have given. Perhaps a somewhat related observation is the "divergence" between dialects, where things just don't sound quite right or completely different had they been translated with the same characters. Examples for this would be chocolate (朱古力 in Cantonese and 巧克力 in Mandarin); salad (沙律 in Cantonese and 沙拉 in Mandarin); and very often names for places and people.
peteretep 7y ago
Notably these are European world maps, translated into Chinese. This would seem to be a particularly petty / knitpicking observation except for the whole "Zheng He Discovered America" bullshit[0] [0] https://www.1843magazine.com/travel/cartophilia/did-china-discover-america https://www.1843magazine.com/travel/cartophilia/did-china-di...
- nathanyukai 7y ago
  No one said Zheng He discovered America. He was mostly sailing south east asia, india etc. Possibly Australia.
  - peteretep 7y ago
    > No one said The article literally opens with “DID CHINA DISCOVER AMERICA?”
    - avaku 7y ago
      I guess they deleted that part now :)
      - PavlovsCat 7y ago
        Nope, they didn't, it's still the headline of the article and the first thing on the page.
  - slowenough 7y ago
    People did say Zheng He was a 7 foot tall Muslim eunuch from southwest China, with a sixty inch belly. That's not all: "The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world's busiest waterway...Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not seem to impress them ("if one's eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances", one of Zheng's officers wrote)...and Mecca, which did. The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good 9000 miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng's ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in this bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did. ... Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they conceded is quite right that Zheng's logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature...never mention any of these discoveries?" - from, Why The West Rules For Now
murermader 7y ago
Well, these maps are pretty bad, considering they were made in 2010
PavlovsCat 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Ming_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Ming_China > The adoption of European astronomy, facilitated by the failure of indigenous astronomy to make progress, was accompanied by a sinocentric reinterpretation that declared the imported ideas Chinese in origin: > > European astronomy was so much judged worth consideration that numerous Chinese authors developed the idea that the Chinese of antiquity had anticipated most of the novelties presented by the missionaries as European discoveries, for example, the rotundity of the Earth and the "heavenly spherical star carrier model." Making skillful use of philology, these authors cleverly reinterpreted the greatest technical and literary works of Chinese antiquity. From this sprang a new science wholly dedicated to the demonstration of the Chinese origin of astronomy and more generally of all European science and technology. https://shanghai.ist/2019/09/05/this-group-of-scholars-have-concluded-that-english-is-actually-a-chinese-dialect/ https://shanghai.ist/2019/09/05/this-group-of-scholars-have-... https://www.philstar.com/world/2019/09/10/1950642/chinese-scholars-claim-english-actually-mandarin https://www.philstar.com/world/2019/09/10/1950642/chinese-sc... > A group of Chinese scholars claim that all European languages, including English, are actually Mandarin dialects. > Speaking at the first China International Frontier Education Summit in Beijing, the World Civilization Research Association also argued that Europe had no history before the 15th century from "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt: > Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.
- dang 7y ago
  Since you won't stop using HN for ideological and nationalistic battle and have ignored our requests, I've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
sadfad 7y ago
asdhufadsfasdf
mywacaday 7y ago
Any idea why the northern passage was shown as open or why the passage into the caspian and black seas are wide open, those routes would have been very well understood?

112 points by benbreen 7y ago

Interesting but not as remarkable as the author seems to think, and certainly the New World parts of the maps are copied from European maps rather than being the result of independent and previously unknown exploration. The “island of California” was a mistake in much earlier maps, which got corrected in the late 16th century and then managed to sneak back into maps again in 1622. Australia is a bit more interesting — Dirk Hartog had mapped the west coast in some detail just four years previously, though none of the detail makes it in here. Torres and Janszoon had also spotted the northern coast but not mapped it in much detail. The map is also remarkable as much for what it’s missing as what it has. A pretty good depiction of the Gulf of Mexico, but Indonesia is a bunch of random blobs, and... just one island of Japan?

jacobolus 7y ago
If you look at a large number of historical maps, you’ll notice that each mapmaker / each country had their own errors (sometimes trivial spelling mistakes, or pairs of cities with the labels swapped, other times comically wrong coastlines or even stuff like California-as-an-island) which persisted for centuries after corrections had been made in maps from other makers. If you compare the errors you can figure out pretty easily which previous map “lineage” was used as the basis for any particular map.

bigpumpkin 7y ago

On the "Map of the Myriad Countries of the World" (1602 AD) bears a description near Europe: "The continent of Europe has over thirty countries. All implement the laws of the past sovereigns. No heterodox doctrines are followed. They only believe in the Lord of the Heaven, the Emperor on High, and the doctrines of the ancient sage kings." [1] [1]https://books.google.com/books?id=c9G6Eeh-CMgC&pg=PA253&lpg=PA253#v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.com/books?id=c9G6Eeh-CMgC&pg=PA253&lpg=...

rsynnott 7y ago
That was ~accurate at the time; that period was more or less peak religious suppression in most of Europe.
- yorwba 7y ago
  It is accurate in one sense and highly misleading in another. Check out the Google Books link. A Chinese bureaucrat reading that description would have imagined entirely different "past sovereigns" (Chinese ones) and "heterodox doctrines" (differing from mainstream Chinese philosophy). By equivocating between established concepts and Christian ones, the Jesuits displayed Christianity as much less of a foreign ideology than it actually was.

ngcc_hk 7y ago

Frightened me a bit as the chinese like to claim ... but this is more early world map in chinese not chinese world map. It is just some foreigner mapped world plus some translation. This is different from the chinese sky map where the observation may be foreigner but the idea is chinese. In fact all the first round chinese catholic got killed due to the observation not marched the chinese cosmology (based on 5 elements). Here really just translation.

dwohnitmok 7y ago

One thing I've always found fascinating about Matteo Ricci's maps, is that he is almost certainly personally the direct source of a few names of foreign (to China) lands that have persisted into modern Chinese. That is his translation dictated how future generations would call those lands. Two major examples are Europe (欧罗巴) and Asia (亚细亚). The article also points out Canada (加拿大). It's not too often that you're able to trace the etymology of widespread words removed by several centuries to a single person (the major exception for English of course being Shakespeare).

lordgrenville 7y ago
I read recently (don't recall the source) that Shakespeare may not have coined many of the words attributed to him, but is just the earliest known source, since we have maintained much more of his writing than that of his contemporaries or predecessors.
carlob 7y ago
Matteo Ricci is also known for being one of the pioneers of mnemonics. Some of the techniques he employed were known in the middle ages before printed books (in the West), but he wrote one of the first treatises on mnemonics. A Jesuit once told this was because he wasn't allowed to bring books into China and so he had to memorize everything, but I can't find confirmation of this claim.
hmwhy 7y ago
It may be true that many the Chinese names for those lands are the same, or at least very similar, to those used in Ricci's maps; but, suppose you could remove all existing knowledge about what those lands are called in the Chinese language and ask well-educated Chinese speakers to name them base on their Italian (or whatever more appropriate) names, I think people will still come up with very similar names. The reason is because many foreign words are translated according to how they sound, so phonetic (?) requirements already substantially limit the possible choice of characters. Since most (every?) character in Chinese has a meaning, I think people generally prefer choosing characters that have neutral to positive meanings, characters that can be put together to form a word or phrase, and/or those that have meanings associated with the actual word being translated. I think historically there are also "preferred characters" (maybe there is even an unofficial guideline for writers/translators?) when it comes to translating foreign words into Chinese, for example 巴 (bā) is often used for sounds like "ba" or "pa". Some examples of this are the one you have given for Europe (although I think it was likely the "pa" in Europa instead of Europe); Paris (巴黎); and bus (巴士). The same, I think, can be said for most of the characters in the examples you have given. Perhaps a somewhat related observation is the "divergence" between dialects, where things just don't sound quite right or completely different had they been translated with the same characters. Examples for this would be chocolate (朱古力 in Cantonese and 巧克力 in Mandarin); salad (沙律 in Cantonese and 沙拉 in Mandarin); and very often names for places and people.

peteretep 7y ago

Notably these are European world maps, translated into Chinese. This would seem to be a particularly petty / knitpicking observation except for the whole "Zheng He Discovered America" bullshit[0] [0] https://www.1843magazine.com/travel/cartophilia/did-china-discover-america https://www.1843magazine.com/travel/cartophilia/did-china-di...

nathanyukai 7y ago
No one said Zheng He discovered America. He was mostly sailing south east asia, india etc. Possibly Australia.
- peteretep 7y ago
  > No one said The article literally opens with “DID CHINA DISCOVER AMERICA?”
  - avaku 7y ago
    I guess they deleted that part now :)
    - PavlovsCat 7y ago
      Nope, they didn't, it's still the headline of the article and the first thing on the page.
- slowenough 7y ago
  People did say Zheng He was a 7 foot tall Muslim eunuch from southwest China, with a sixty inch belly. That's not all: "The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world's busiest waterway...Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not seem to impress them ("if one's eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances", one of Zheng's officers wrote)...and Mecca, which did. The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good 9000 miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng's ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in this bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did. ... Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they conceded is quite right that Zheng's logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature...never mention any of these discoveries?" - from, Why The West Rules For Now

murermader 7y ago

Well, these maps are pretty bad, considering they were made in 2010

PavlovsCat 7y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Ming_China https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_Earth#Ming_China > The adoption of European astronomy, facilitated by the failure of indigenous astronomy to make progress, was accompanied by a sinocentric reinterpretation that declared the imported ideas Chinese in origin: > > European astronomy was so much judged worth consideration that numerous Chinese authors developed the idea that the Chinese of antiquity had anticipated most of the novelties presented by the missionaries as European discoveries, for example, the rotundity of the Earth and the "heavenly spherical star carrier model." Making skillful use of philology, these authors cleverly reinterpreted the greatest technical and literary works of Chinese antiquity. From this sprang a new science wholly dedicated to the demonstration of the Chinese origin of astronomy and more generally of all European science and technology. https://shanghai.ist/2019/09/05/this-group-of-scholars-have-concluded-that-english-is-actually-a-chinese-dialect/ https://shanghai.ist/2019/09/05/this-group-of-scholars-have-... https://www.philstar.com/world/2019/09/10/1950642/chinese-scholars-claim-english-actually-mandarin https://www.philstar.com/world/2019/09/10/1950642/chinese-sc... > A group of Chinese scholars claim that all European languages, including English, are actually Mandarin dialects. > Speaking at the first China International Frontier Education Summit in Beijing, the World Civilization Research Association also argued that Europe had no history before the 15th century from "The Origins of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt: > Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it. The assertion that the Moscow subway is the only one in the world is a lie only so long as the Bolsheviks have not the power to destroy all the others. In other words, the method of infallible prediction, more than any other totalitarian propaganda device, betrays its ultimate goal of world conquest, since only in a world completely under his control could the totalitarian ruler possibly realize all his lies and make true all his prophecies.

dang 7y ago
Since you won't stop using HN for ideological and nationalistic battle and have ignored our requests, I've banned this account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

sadfad 7y ago

asdhufadsfasdf

mywacaday 7y ago

Any idea why the northern passage was shown as open or why the passage into the caspian and black seas are wide open, those routes would have been very well understood?