All Under Heaven

October 15, 2007 12:20 PM

Antique Maps of China A database of 230 maps, charts, pictures, books and atlases from the Special Collections of The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Library. You can browse thumbnails of maps dating back to the 15th century, then download a splendid colour PDF, for example, the 1923 map Carte des environs de Peking. There are also some world maps and ones of a few other places.
posted by Abiezer (13 comments total)

Sweet! Thanks!
posted by sudasana at 4:18 PM on October 15, 2007

These are cool. What do antique Chinese maps of China look like? (I can't find any online.)
posted by carsonb at 5:09 PM on October 15, 2007

Excellent. This one is being bookmarked and forwarded to my historian brother, who's putting together a world history course on cities.

Thanks.
posted by bumpkin at 5:19 PM on October 15, 2007

OK, I found some Chinese maps of (parts of) China here.
posted by carsonb at 5:27 PM on October 15, 2007

carsonb - you can read a bit about Chinese cartography here. It was the Jesuits who really introduced the Western style.
I've long wanted to do a post about on a great story a friend much better informed about the history of Beijing told me - that the city was laid out to correspond to parts of an imagined body of the celestial Nezha - parts were his limbs (the city gates iirc), part his head, part his genitals even. I think Tiananmen Square is where his brains were supposed to be. There's a bit online but nothing too great in English or Chinese that I have found.
posted by Abiezer at 5:44 PM on October 15, 2007

I love old maps--You can't really get a sense of a time period unless you know how the people viewed the world.
posted by Citizen Premier at 6:52 PM on October 15, 2007

I especially like chinese stone maps.
posted by dhruva at 9:30 PM on October 15, 2007

Wow, this is great. I love maps, I love old maps, and this is quite a collection! Thanks, Abiezer.
posted by flapjax at midnite at 4:39 AM on October 16, 2007

It was the Jesuits who really introduced the Western style.

Incidentally, one of these Jesuits, Giuseppe Castiglione, was played on a long running Chinese state TV mini-series by Canadian actor and laowai extrordinaire Da Shan (Mark Rowswell discussed previously), sort of the "Shogun" of CCTV. The more you know...

sorry for the derail, now on with the awesome post
posted by Pollomacho at 5:04 AM on October 16, 2007

Hardly a derail, Pollomacho. I think my current stage of expattery demands that I profess an admiration for Roswell's parleying of what skills he had into a successful career whilst denying I ever watch anything he does.
The Jesuits in China were an amazing bunch. I read the ubiquitous Jonathan Spence on Matteo Ricci. I understand their burial ground has been restored.
The only shame with the main link is that the PDFs aren't at a stellar resolution, so I can't quite play spot my house on the Beijing ones.
posted by Abiezer at 5:52 AM on October 16, 2007

Yeah, I was going to complain about that—what's the point of having a city map if you can't read the labels? (Also, pdf: WTF?) And the selection is oriented (sorry, that was entirely unintentional!) more towards antique pictorial maps (and just plain pictures), so that the early-modern real maps I was hoping for aren't there (there is, for example, no map of Shanghai). But that's my problem, not theirs, and there are other sites that have the kind of maps I crave.

Nice find!

a great story a friend much better informed about the history of Beijing told me - that the city was laid out to correspond to parts of an imagined body of the celestial Nezha

I dunno—sounds like urban legend to me. I would guess that Peking was laid out in imitation of earlier capitals, specifically the great Han/Tang capital of Changan (after which Kyoto was also modeled). But I'd certainly be interested to see what you come up with when you start investigating. I loved this from the Wikipedia article on Nezha (n.b.: pinyin zh = English j):

When his mother got pregnant, she waited for three years and six months to deliver the boy, but unfortunately a meat ball was born.

I think that happens a lot.
posted by languagehat at 6:43 AM on October 16, 2007

Wow. This is a fantastic find. I find maps so fascinating, but these... Compelling stuff.
posted by Badger at 1:49 PM on October 16, 2007

languagehat - I can't access JSTOR etc. unfortunately, but if you can there a couple of scholarly things - apparently this one and here. I recall for sure if it was one of those post-hoc folk things or not from memory. The person who told me said he and some friends were preparing something online too, but no sign as yet.
posted by Abiezer at 5:45 PM on October 16, 2007