"Giulio Aleni's map sheet : exploring the contents and materiality of the only known Ming-era print" / Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky in Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 2025-01, p.1-20

JRAS, Series 3 (2025), 1–20
doi:10.1017/S1356186324000257 (Open Access)

Available at Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (2025)

Local access pdf [Cams and Papelitzky-Giulio Alenis map.pdf].

Abstract:
Japan's Kobe City Museum holds a unique yet overlooked xylographic print of an early seventeenth-century composition that centres on a Chinese-language world map, mounted as a scroll. At first glance, the scroll seems to contain a copy of a well-known composition attributed to the Jesuit Giulio Aleni that is extant at two Italian libraries. It is known in the literature as Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖, after the title of only one of three constitutive parts. Detailed comparison shows that the hitherto unstudied Kobe sheet is significantly older. This observation initiates a discussion of the contents and materiality of the Kobe sheet in three steps. First, a reconstruction of intertextual connections to late Ming books based on the introductory text illustrates the function of the sheet map. Second, the origins of the maps proper are investigated, which, unlike the introductory text, can be traced back to a collaborative book project. In a last step, the afterlife of these map sheets is discussed, further illuminating the genealogy of maps that facilitated the production of the Kobe sheet. Throughout, this article highlights the local co-creation of map artefacts and the necessity to study maps in context, beyond the analysis of their cartographic contents.

Remapping the World in East Asia: Toward a Global History of the "Ricci Maps" Edited by Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: Remapping the World in East Asia / Mario Cams and Elke Papelitzky -- World Maps as Spaces of Intercultural Communication / Nicolas Standaert -- A Late Ming Terrestrial Globe / Richard A. Pegg -- Explaining European Geography: The Zhifang waiji and Its Editions / Wang Yongjie -- From the Wall onto the Screen: Reframing World Maps in East Asia / Cheng Fangyi -- Circling the Square: Encompassing Global Geography on Large Commercial Maps / Mario Cams -- World Maps from China Reimagined in Japan / Elke Papelitzky -- From China to Korea: Kim Suhong's Cheonha gogeum daechong pyeollam do / Yang Yulei -- Utopia and Dystopia: Cheonha do and the Reception of Renaissance Geography in Late Joseon Korea / Soh Jeanhyoung -- A Manuscript Map of East Asia Assembled by Jesuits in Nagasaki and Macao / Marco Caboara -- China Translata: The 1555 Map of Advantageous Terrain Then and Now / Florin-Stefan Morar -- Beyond Translation: Michele Ruggieri's Manuscript Atlas of China / Lin Hong -- Postscript: Remapping Map History from East Asia / Matthew H. Edney.

"When European missionaries arrived in East Asia in the sixteenth century, they entered ongoing conversations about cosmology and world geography. Soon after, intellectuals in Ming China, Edo Japan, and Joseon Korea selectively encompassed elements of the late Renaissance worldview, leading to the creation of new artifacts that mitigated old and new knowledge in creative ways. Simultaneously, missionaries and their collaborators transcribed, replicated, and recombined from East Asian artifacts and informed European audiences about the newly discovered lands known as the "Far East." All these new artifacts enjoyed long afterlives that ensured the continuous remapping of the world in the following decades and centuries. Focusing on artifacts, this expansively illustrated volume tells the story of a meeting of worldviews. Tracing the connections emanating from each artifact, the authors illuminate how every map, globe, or book was shaped by the intellectual, social, and material cultures of East Asia, while connecting multiple global centers of learning and print culture. Crossing both historical and historiographical boundaries reveals how this series of artifacts embody a continuous and globally connected process of mapping the world, rather than a grand encounter between East and West. As such, this book rewrites the narrative surrounding the so-called "Ricci Maps," which assumes that one Jesuit missionary brought scientific cartography to East Asia by translating and adapting a Renaissance world map. It argues for a revision of that narrative by emphasizing process and connectivity, displacing the European missionary and "his map" as central actors that supposedly bridged a formidable civilizational divide between Europe and China. Rather than a single map authored by a European missionary, a series of materially different artifacts were created as a result of discussions between the Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his Chinese contacts during the last decades of Ming rule. Each of these gave rise to the production of new artifacts that embodied broader intellectual conversations. By presenting eleven original chapters by Asian, European, and American scholars, this work covers an extensive range of artifacts and crosses boundaries between China, Japan, Korea, and the global pathways that connected them to the other end of the Eurasian landmass"