World Map according to China in 1799
Posted by PY_2312
World Map according to China in 1799
Posted by PY_2312
23 Comments
Massive Netherlands
Interessante gosto muito de ver esses mapas antigos bem legal.
funny they didn’t have that other continent…
After all, this was before China embraced chairman Mao’s teaching 🙂🇨🇳
Somebody did not get the memo about North and South America.
Surprisingly accurate
You got sauce for this?
I’d expect India to be a bit more accurate given their proximity
Wow. They really had a terrible sense of the shape of their own coastline and of a bunch of regions relatively close to them.
The basic gist of Europe and Africa is about as accurate as their depiction of SE Asia and the Islands of the western Pacific Ocean. And totally botched the Indian Ocean, a region they would have had normal trade connections with for centuries.
Is this map perhaps highly stylized on purpose?
Which way did they tend to orient the map?
Can someone translate names?
A few minutes of browsing didn’t produce a source for this map but Chinese cartography was significantly better than this before 1799 so, if the above map is real, it’s not representative of what was being used for practical purposes at the time. Examples:
(1390) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography_of_China#/media/File:Da-ming-hun-yi-tu.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography_of_China#/media/File:Da-ming-hun-yi-tu.jpg)
(1602) [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography_of_China#/media/File:Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu_by_Matteo_Ricci_Plate_1-3.jpg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography_of_China#/media/File:Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu_by_Matteo_Ricci_Plate_1-3.jpg)
I read some stuff a while back about how maps like this were not meant to be accurate, more representational (*That might not be the right word*). Coastline shapes, landmass size, and distance may not have been important to whatever information this map was trying to convey.
The thing I read was about specific Japanese maps that were highly inaccurate to real-world scales, but were only meant to represent general layouts and information for (essentially) tax purposes. There were other examples from china and some from Europe that were similar.
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Got all the important parts covered, nice.
Reminds me of that one map in north Korea where the Korean peninsula is disproportionately larger than it should be
pretty accurate.
They drew Africa better than China
For 1799 that’s pretty terrible.
OP should have used a higher res version. The names for African regions are hilarious: black demon, curly haired black demon, cape of black demon, king black demon…
Not very middle of them
I am 99% sure this is AI slop. I did a reverse image search on it and it only turns up on Reddit, Instagram, Facebook, X, TikTok etc. No Wikipedia article, no articles on university websites. I’ll report it.
Didn’t know Mecca was in Africa