Here’s a woodblock-printed map of Yunnan province’s Jizu Shan (雞足山) – Chickenfoot Mountain – which peaks at 3240m east of Erhai Lake and the old walled town of Dali. According to the artist Huang Xiangjian, who painted a colour landscape scroll of the mountain in 1656, Jizu Shan got its name because “it is formed with three ridges in front …
Verbiest’s World Map 坤與全圖
In 2016 I was extraordinarily lucky to come across this woodblock-printed world map at an antiques stall in Beijing. (The poor quality of the photo is because they didn’t want me taking one, and I had to sneak it from a distance with my ancient, low-res ipod touch camera. They wouldn’t sell me the print either.) The original version dates …
A Japanese Map of Qing China
A while back I bought this map of China, hand-drawn in ink, from a dealer in Japan. Other things also point to it being a Japanese-made map: the translucent, resilient paper, typical of Japanese manufacture; an emphasis on marked routes from Japan (a country that China showed little interest in until recent times); and the general style, similar to Japanese …
Verbiest’s Map of China
Back in June 2016, I was a bit stunned to find this huge, woodblock-printed world map (坤與全圖) hanging up at an antiques stall in Beijing. It wasn’t for sale, and it took me some time to sweet-talk them around the “no photographs” sign (in fact they only let me take this picture because the quality of my ipod camera is so …