A new exhibition at the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center, Heaven and Earth: The Blue Maps of China, focuses on two extraordinary Chinese maps from the early 19th century printed using Prussian blue pigment.

These maps were presented in an extraordinary format, on eight vertical sheets printed in the style of rubbings. Even more strikingly, they were rendered in a rich blue coloring. The pigment Prussian blue had recently begun to be produced in China, and these maps were amongst the first printed objects in East Asia to make use of the colorant—predating the famous use of Prussian blue by Japanese print artists soon after.

The blue maps were more than just visually astonishing. They also captured Chinese ideas about the relationship between terrestrial and celestial space, and still provide insight today into how Chinese scholars and artists conceptualized the world around them. Beautiful and powerful in equal measure, these blue maps capture details of a transitional moment in the history of China—and the wider world. This exhibition considers these two maps in the context of their production, consumption, and functionality, revealing them as unique objects in the global history of mapmaking.

The online version is full of interesting detail about the maps’ materials and production. The physical exhibition opened last weekend and runs until 31 August 2024. Free admission.

Previously: Philippine Censors Want ‘Barbie’ Blurred, Not Banned; The Nine-Dash Line Gets ‘Barbie’ Banned in Vietnam.

That follows the Warner Bros. line; last Thursday Variety reported the Warner Bros. response to Barbie being banned in Vietnam: “‘The map in Barbie Land is a child-like crayon drawing,’ a spokesperson for the Warner Bros. Film Group told Variety. ‘The doodles depict Barbie’s make-believe journey from Barbie Land to the “real world.” It was not intended to make any type of statement.’”

(Based on the screenshots I’ve seen, all it is is a dashed line extending east from a wildly inaccurate Asia; there are dashed lines elsewhere on the map that suggest routes more than borders.)

Previously: The Nine-Dash Line Gets ‘Barbie’ Banned in Vietnam.

Meanwhile, the South China Morning Post reports that “iPhone and Apple Watch users in China can no longer see their geographic coordinates and elevation on the Compass app, according to Chinese media reports and user comments. However, information including bearings and general location are still available.”

And according to a report in The Information (paywall) that was summarized by John Gruber, back in 2014 or 2015 the Chinese State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping required Apple Maps to make the disputed Diaoyu (Senkaku) Islands appear large even when zoomed out, and made the Apple Watch’s Chinese release contingent on that request—to which Apple acquiesced.

Inspired, he says, by Itchy Feet’s maps of Every European City and Every American City, Alfred Twu has come up with a Map of Every Chinese City. (Chinese version here.) Twu is no stranger to these parts: he worked on rail maps for California and the Northeast Corridor some years back.

Previously: Itchy Feet’s Map of Every European City; Itchy Feet’s Map of Every American City.

Blurring or removing map data to prevent people from seeing something important or sensitive is a pretty loud signal that there’s something important or sensitive to see there. Some five million Baidu Maps tiles were masked in Xinjiang alone—there’s a lot the Chinese government considers sensitive—which made the unmasking considerably harder. But not impossible.

As you may have seen elsewhere, the coronavirus pandemic is having an impact on air pollution, as countries shut down human and economic activity in an attempt to deal with the outbreak. Take nitrogen dioxide. Tropospheric NO₂ density decreased significantly over China between January and February, and the same seems to be happening in northern Italy, which normally has some of the most severe air pollution in Europe. See the ESA’s animation:

More broadly, try this online map, which compares NO₂ emissions before and after 20 February 2020 anywhere on the planet. [Maps Mania]

Previously: Mapping Nitrogen Dioxide Pollution.

Another interactive map tracking novel coronavirus infections, this one from University of Washington geographer Bo Zhao. Like the Johns Hopkins map (previously), it compiles information from multiple sources.

The country-level data is collected from WHO, while the data of each province in China is collected from multiple sources such as China’s NHC, Mapmiao and Baidu. Notably, we also refer to CDC to verify the virus spreading status in the U.S. To make a timely data and map updates, we collect the data every 4 hours, and verify the data quality per day. In addition, we plan to provide finer-scale data from China (the county level), U.S. (the state level) and Canada (the province level) in the next version.

More at UW News. [Geography Realm]

Previously: Tracking the Wuhan Coronavirus; The Washington Post Maps the Spread of the New Coronavirus.

Johns Hopkins University’s CSSE has created an interactive map and online dashboard to track the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. Details at their blog post:

The case data visualized is collected from various sources, including WHO, U.S. CDC, ECDC, China CDC (CCDC), NHC and DXY. DXY is a Chinese website that aggregates NHC and local CCDC situation reports in near real-time, providing more current regional case estimates than the national level reporting organizations are capable of, and is thus used for all the mainland China cases reported in our dashboard (confirmed, suspected, recovered, deaths). U.S. cases (confirmed, suspected, recovered, deaths) are taken from the U.S. CDC, and all other country (suspected and confirmed) case data is taken from the corresponding regional health departments. The dashboard is intended to provide the public with an understanding of the outbreak situation as it unfolds, with transparent data sources.

The data is also downloadable. [Geography Realm/Maps Mania]

Meanwhile, the Washington Post has created a series of maps showing where the outbreak started and the nearby areas at risk.

Previously: The Washington Post Maps the Spread of the New Coronavirus.

Update, 31 Jan: Maps from the New York Times.

The Washington Post has mapped the spread of the new strain of coronavirus, which appeared last month in Wuhan and has since spread. They’ll be updating the map, and this won’t be the only map tracking the disease, so this isn’t the final word on the subject.

Previously: The Russians Are Spoofing! The Russians Are Spoofing!

Meanwhile, Typhoon Mangkhut has hit the Philippines and is moving toward China. The New York Times has a map tracking the storm’s path; NASA has posted a number of visible-light and infrared images of the storm as well.

Previously: The Business of Making Maps for Self-Driving Cars.

Using old maps as “proof” of one side’s claim over disputed territory, or a disputed place name, is something we’ve seen many times before. It’s happening with the Paracel Islands as well. They’re claimed (and occupied) by China as part of their claim on the South China Sea (the Nine-Dash Line); Vietnam considers the islands as part of Đà Nẵng province. While the central Vietnamese government has been somewhat careful regarding its boundary dispute with China, the same cannot be said for Đà Nẵng’s government, which has asked a local historian, Tran Duc Anh Son, to collect old maps and documents supporting Vietnam’s claims to the islands (which it calls the Hoàng Sa Archipelago). The New York Times has the story. [WMS]

Previously: Vietnam Objects to Map World’s Boundaries.

Previously: The Selden Map.

Previously: China at the Center.

This Taipei Times article suggests that some copies of the Ricci map—Matteo Ricci’s 1602 map of the world produced for the Chinese emperor—have been altered, possibly to support (or at least not contradict) the present-day Chinese territorial claim to the Spratly Islands (and the nine-dash line). In particular, the article claims, the James Ford Bell Trust’s copy of the map has been altered:

Part of the legend reading “between the 15th and 42nd parallels” had been erased, with ocean patterns painted over the erasure. […] Whether this is a recent defacement done to obliterate evidence that China’s historical primacy in the South China Sea is a modern fiction, or an ancient one done to eliminate an error, is a subject for further research. […] Nonetheless, several other 16th century copies of the Ricci-Li map exist in Europe, South Korea and Japan, and all display the legend intact.

To be honest, the article isn’t so much making a case as it is casting some aspersions. It has an agenda: to shoot down the argument that China’s claims to the Spratly Islands are supported by the historical record. The Ricci map—like so many other maps caught up in territorial disputes and conspiracy theories—is simply a means to an end. [WMS/Leventhal Map Center]

Here’s a review in the Wall Street Journal of the Asian Art Museum’s exhibition, China at the Center, which I’ve told you about before.

The show includes portraits of both as well as a half-dozen books to evoke the libraries each brought and the impact they had. Most helpful, however, are two large touchscreens, one for each map, that allow us to access translations and summaries of many of the texts. This quickly becomes addictive, because the journey is full of surprises. Here, we read about scientific theories or descriptions based on travelers’ accounts. There, we learn how best to capture a unicorn.

[WMS]

Previously: China at the Center; Upcoming Symposium: Reimagining the Globe and Cultural Exchange.

Ricci (1552–1610) and Verbiest (1623–1688) were both Jesuit priests, in China to spread Christianity; their maps, produced in collaboration with Chinese calligraphers, artists and printers, produced a fundamental rethinking of China’s place in the world. Not that China wasn’t at the centre of these maps, as the essays in the accompanying catalogue point out, but these maps filled out the rest of the world, which was previously a marginal afterthought in Chinese cartography.

Ricci’s map, A Complete Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the World or Kun yu wan guo quan tu (坤輿萬國全圖), is the better known of the two. It’s the first map in Chinese to depict the Americas, and has been called the “Impossible Black Tulip” due to its rarity and importance. A synthesis of European and Chinese traditions, it uses a pseudocylindrical map projection and was printed on mulberry paper panels from six large blocks of wood.

The 1602 map was Ricci’s third or fourth world map, made for the Wanli Emperor; only six examples are known to exist today. The copy on display at the Asian Art Museum is on loan from the James Bell Ford Trust, and is famous in its own right: the Trust paid $1 million for it in 2009; though owned by the Trust, it’s normally part of the collection of the University of Minnesota’s James Bell Ford Library. Before arriving in Minnesota it went on display at the Library of Congress, which made the high-resolution scan you see above. (Of the other five, three are in Japanese libraries, one is in a Vatican library, and one is in private hands.)

On the other hand, the Verbiest map, called A Complete Map of the World or Kun yu quan tu (坤輿全圖), has never been on display before, though the exhibition’s copy has been owned by the Library of Congress since 1930 (see scan above). Based on Blaeu’s then-recent world map (but reversing the hemispheres to put China closer to the centre), the Verbiest map displayed the world in two hemispheres. It was somewhat smaller than the Ricci map, and was mounted on eight scrolls. About half a dozen or so complete examples remain today.

Both maps were produced by Jesuit priests working in China, whose knowledge of the wider world was seen as a wedge: useful knowledge that would go hand in hand with their Christian mission. The catalogue that accompanies this exhibition explains this in some detail. China at the Center: Ricci and Verbiest World Maps is edited by Natasha Reichle and contains three essays: one by Ricci Institute director Antoni Üçerler on the role played by missionaries to China in disseminating knowledge in both directions; one by Theodore N. Foss on the Ricci map; and one by Mark Stephen Mir on the Verbiest map. The first essay provides context; the latter two go into detail about the priests, their background, their time in China, and the maps that today are known by their names.

At 64 pages, the book is slim, but the essays are useful and enlightening, and it’s full of lovely illustrations, including close-up details of the two maps, and printed on heavy paper. Most importantly, it has foldout pages with reproductions of the Ricci and Verbiest maps in their entirety. It was published yesterday and is available now for $19.95 (though as usual you can get it for less at Amazon).

I received a review copy of China at the Center from the Museum.

Previously on the Ricci Map: Time on Ricci; NY Times on Ricci Map Exhibition; 1602 Ricci Map Now on Display; “Impossible Black Tulip” Coming to the University of Minnesota.

The Nation has a long article by Paula Findlen on the Selden Map, a Chinese watercolour map acquired by the 17th-century jurist and scholar John Selden and bequeathed to the Bodleian Library in 1659. Findlen recounts the origins of the map and its rediscovery in the Bodleian’s vaults in 2008, and describes it in intricate detail. [via]

The map’s rediscovery has set off a flurry of interest and publications (see book list below). Findlen also looks at the scholarly debates about the map. “Brook and Batchelor have both written books about the Selden map, and each scholar takes a somewhat different approach to framing the story and to interpreting a reconstruction of the document’s origins. Yet they concur that this is a Chinese maritime map and a product of late-Ming ambitions, enterprise, and mobility,” she writes.

The Bodleian has a website dedicated to the Selden Map, which includes an online viewer (Flash required). See also Robert Batchelor’s page.

Books About the Selden Map:

• London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549-1689 by Robert K. Batchelor (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
  Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks

• Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer by Timothy Brook (Bloomsbury [U.S.], House of Anansi [Canada], Profile [U.K.], 2013).
  Amazon (Canada, U.K.) | iBooks (Canada, U.K.)

• The Selden Map of China: A New Understanding of the Ming Dynasty by Hongping Annie Nie (Bodleian Libraries, 2014).
  Available as a PDF in English and Chinese.

Previously: More Map Books; Two More Map Books.