When a map of overwhelming dimensions and detail is presented to the ruler of a land, the homage, surely, is a kind of deference. The map is partly meant to be an illustration of the ruler’s powers, the extent of his realm, the range of learning he commands.
And yes, one of the remarkable aspects of the world map on display at the Library of Congress through April 10 is that along with its imposing scale — it is 3.8m long and 1.6m high — it has grand ambitions: It encompasses the known world of the early 17th century. At its very center stands China called, its mountains and rivers commanding attention with dense annotation, all of which is in Chinese.
Created by an Italian-born Jesuit priest, Matteo Ricci, and apparently commissioned by the court of Emperor Wanli (萬曆) in 1602 — the year after Ricci became the first Westerner admitted to Beijing and then the Forbidden City — this map is indeed partly a tribute to the land in which Ricci had lived since 1582, and in which he would die in 1610.
One of his commentaries on the map (placed just south of the Tropic of Capricorn), declares that he is “filled with admiration for the great Chinese Empire,” where he has been treated “with friendly hospitality far above my deserts.”
Over the landmass of China, he comments: “The Middle Kingdom is renowned for the greatness of its civilization.”
That greatness can be sensed in the delicate cartographic detail that had to be meticulously carved onto six wood blocks before being printed on rice paper.
Ricci’s explanatory Chinese commentary is so extensive in some regions that it seems to cover the terrain. The map was meant to stand on six folding screens and can be imagined engulfing its observer.
Ricci created two earlier versions, beginning in 1584, drawing on atlases and materials he took with him on his journey from Italy. But this third version is the earliest to survive and the first to have combined information from both Eastern and Western cartography. It is also the oldest surviving map to have given the Chinese a larger vision of the Earth.
Even the sturdiest of wall maps tend to have limited life spans, but this large, segmented map is so rare that for centuries it was uncertain if this copy even existed, which is why it has been nicknamed the “impossible black tulip” of maps. It is one of six known copies.
Last October the James Ford Bell Trust paid US$1 million for the map, buying it from a private Japanese owner. It will be permanently displayed at the University of Minnesota in the James Ford Bell Library, which Bell (the founder of General Mills) established to document the impact and history of international trade before 1800.
The Library of Congress does not usually display items from outside its collection, but given the importance of this map, which is also the first Eastern map to show the Americas, it arranged for this temporary display, showing the map for the first time in the US. It is also creating a detailed digital scan to be posted online.
The Ricci map is mounted directly opposite the library’s own mega-purchase, the US$10 million 1507 Waldseemueller World Map, the first map to name America. Each is pioneering in its presentation of the New World, in one case to Europe, in the other to Asia.
According to the library, these are also the two most expensive maps ever bought, and they are temporarily on display together as part of the continuing exhibition “Exploring the Early Americas.”
But the library has seriously failed visitors by not including a more extensive explanation of the Ricci map beyond a single panel of text; it does not even provide a translation of the Chinese characters punctuating it. I used a 1918 translation made available by Daniel Crouch, the map specialist at Bernard J. Shapero Rare Books in London, who helped handle the map’s purchase and wrote an informative essay for the sale (unfortunately not at the exhibition, but available from the author through an e-mail request to maps@shapero.com).
The map’s text is necessary to understand the intricacies of its negotiations and presentations, because it is only partly an act of homage. It was also part of a diplomatic attempt by Ricci to affirm the greatness of his own religion and culture.
He was, after all, a Jesuit priest whose intention was to convert the Chinese to Roman Catholicism. And that was something, he thought, that might be helped by demonstrating the superior understanding of the world that he believed grew out of Christian faith.
Ricci translated Euclid into Chinese, demonstrated Western clocks to the Chinese and created a method for representing Chinese using the Western alphabet. As Jonathan Spence points out in his classic book, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, he even gave the Chinese lessons in special techniques of memorization.
This map is an extension of his Jesuitical project, so while paying homage to the Chinese, Ricci was also well aware that the map was partly a demonstration, an argument. It is not decorated with an ornate compass rose or mythological sea creatures, nor does it display terrifying terra incognita. It is devoutly rational, even scientific: It contains descriptions of the world’s peoples that may seem wildly fanciful, but are based on the authoritative sources of Ricci’s time.
It also incorporates an explanation of parallels and meridians, a proof that the sun is larger than the moon, a table showing the distances of planets from the Earth, an explanation of the varying lengths of days and nights and polar projections of the Earth that are unusually consistent with its main map. Ricci declares that it offers testimony “to the supreme goodness, greatness and unity of Him who controls heaven and Earth.”
The map, then, portrays the crossroads of two great civilizations. Even as Ricci shifted the geographic center of Western global maps, filling in detailed outlines of China and other regions from Chinese cartographers and annotating the whole in Chinese, he also added a frame that was both rationalist and religious, celebrated Western science and faith and created a culturally hybrid vision of the earthly cosmos.
The result may even be a portrait of the Earth as a Jesuit would like the Chinese to think a Jesuit would see it. The offering is meant to be both humble and full of pride, deferential and assertive, combining sincere homage and earnest self-affirmation.
On the one hand, Ricci stripped away much detail from his portrayal of Europe, making its “24 countries” seem far less central than they were becoming on the world stage. On the other hand, Ricci’s annotations offer grandiose declarations that all Europeans were “reverent adherents of the holy Christian religion,” that “all are versed in the elements of astronomy and philosophy,” and that its princes and subjects were all wealthy.
Ricci also draws on other sources to give brief portraits of other peoples of the world and here the descriptions have all the peculiarities of reports from a Chinese Gulliver. In northern Russia, we are told, there is a “Country of Dwarfs” in which “the inhabitants, both male and female, are only about 1 foot high [30cm].”
“Being constantly devoured by cranes,” Ricci said,” they have to live in caves in order to escape,” at least until they emerge to “destroy the eggs of their enemies, riding on goats.”
In Kanata (Canada), he writes, “inhabitants are kindly and hospitable to strangers,” but “the people living in the mountains kill one another all year round and spend their time in fighting and robbery.”
“They feed exclusively on snakes, ants, spiders and other creeping things,” he said.
These reports of the exotic characters of other lands (traceable to other period authorities) are meant to contrast with the civilizations of Italy and China. The Arctic may house a people with mouths on top of their heads, but look, Ricci seems to say to the Chinese, look what we both have accomplished.
The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia quotes Ricci about the map: “This was the most useful work that could be done at that time to dispose China to give credence to the things of our holy Faith ... Their conception of the greatness of their country and of the insignificance of all other lands made them so proud that the whole world seemed to them savage and barbarous compared with themselves.”
Ricci also suggested that the size and format of the map could have an almost magical, seductive effect. It enables the viewer, he wrote on the map, “to travel about, as it were, while reclining at ease in his own study. Lo! To be able to scan all the countries of the world without going out of doors.”
Spence has pointed out that Ricci was a master of a special technique of memory: He would imagine for himself a great palace and within it, he would place objects related to items he was trying to memorize; as he mentally strolled through this palace, each item would have its place, come easily to mind and be seen as part of a harmonious order. A map has more restrictions on it: Its spaces must correspond proportionally to the world.
But in Ricci’s view, it seems, this enfolding map, too, is a kind of memory palace, reminding its viewers of a real world in which everything is being put in its proper place, a world in which a Chinese emperor and a Jesuit priest might find common ground in a shared embrace of knowledge and faith.
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