A Tour of Cao Junyi's World Map
An interactive tour by Dr. Mario Cams
This splendid woodblock print map dated 1644 is by Cao Junyi 曹君義. It is titled Tianxia Jiubian Wanguo Renji Lucheng Quantu 天下九邊分野人跡路程全圖 [Complete Map of All Under Heaven, the Nine Frontiers, Astral Allocations, Human Traces, and Route Itineraries].
Dr. Mario Cams, Associate Professor of Chinese History at Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, has compiled a detailed 68-point interactive tour, which highlights some of the fine details across the map, helping to tell its story and to provide insights into its rich contents.
In the periphery of the map, we find information taken from a work on world geography and ethnography called "Treatise of Everything Beyond the Administration" (published in 1623). It was co-authored by Chinese scholar Yang Tingyun and European missionary Giulio Aleni. The work organises information per continent and includes maps gleaned from atlases printed in Europe at the turn of the seventeenth century.
At the centre is a dense diagram of the administration of China under the Ming Dynasty, which ruled from 1368 until the 1640s. The entire administrative hierarchy is encoded on this map using different shapes and iconography. The margins framing this map list additional information such as defence structures, foreign countries and a table of distances to the Imperial centre, and between provincial capitals.
To activate the tour, click on the image of the map below. Use the arrows provided in the lower centre of the image panel to navigate through the tour and around the map.
About Dr. Mario Cams
Dr. Mario Cams obtained his Ph.D from Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven in 2015, after completing a project that focused on circulation of cartographic knowledge between Europe and Asia at the turn of the 18th century.
He is the author of Companions in Geography: East-West Collaboration in the Mapping of Qing China (c.1685-1735) (Leiden: Brill, 2017), for which he received the 2017 Prize for Young Scholars from the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology.
He is also the co-founder of QingMaps.org, a digital humanities platform that provides a research and teaching tools for the exploration and the study of Qing-era maps.
Mario's research interests are wide-ranging, although his publications have mostly centred on early modern global connections, late imperial China, and the history of the map and mapping technology.
Find out even more about this fascinating map and the history of mapping during the Qing dynasty in an essay by Man Zheng (Emma Zheng), a PhD candidate in History at the Freie Universität Berlin:
