Early Chinese World Maps (2010) | Hacker News Reader

Early Chinese World Maps (2010)

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112 pointsbenbreen26 comments

Notably these are European world maps, translated into Chinese.

This would seem to be a particularly petty / knitpicking observation except for the whole "Zheng He Discovered America" bullshit[0]

[0] https://www.1843magazine.com/travel/cartophilia/did-china-di...

"1421 The year the Chinese discovered America" is a fascinating book that lays out this theory based on ancient maps and other evidence. The author is a sailor that studied ancient china. Some of his evidence includes wind patterns, American fauna and flora described by the Chinese. Asians plants found in America, and other ancient Chinese artifacts found there. While none alone could prove the theory, the author puts them together in a compelling way.

No one said Zheng He discovered America. He was mostly sailing south east asia, india etc. Possibly Australia.

> No one said

The article literally opens with “DID CHINA DISCOVER AMERICA?”

I guess they deleted that part now :)

People did say Zheng He was a 7 foot tall Muslim eunuch from southwest China, with a sixty inch belly. That's not all:

"The seven Treasure Fleets dispatched between 1405 and 1433 were the grandest projections of state power the world had seen. They did have to fight three times to secure the Straits of Malacca, then as now the world's busiest waterway...Chinese sailors walked the streets of Mogadishu, which did not seem to impress them ("if one's eyes wander one meets only sighs and sulky glances", one of Zheng's officers wrote)...and Mecca, which did.

The Treasure Fleets had sailed south and west a good 9000 miles, but some researchers think this was just the beginning. With their compasses and charts, tankers full of drinking water, and huge stores of food, Zheng's ships could have gone anywhere they wanted; and that, the former submarine captain Gavin Menzies claims in this bestselling book 1421: The Year China Discovered America, is exactly what they did.

...

Historians, however, remain unmoved. Menzies, they conceded is quite right that Zheng's logbooks are lost; but why, the historians ask, does the enormous mass of surviving Ming dynasty literature...never mention any of these discoveries?"

- from, Why The West Rules For Now

Also, the Chinese sailed over the North Pole so global warming is a hoax.

We are finding more and more proof the Chinese were trading with remote parts of Africa many centuries pre-rennaissance. Wouldn't be surprised if they got as far as North/South America.

The last voyage before they turned inward was more than 30,000 people on 3-400 ships on a trading mission. At that scale, seems like enough nautical knowledge to travel most of the globe.

>We are finding more and more proof the Chinese were trading with remote parts of Africa

Like what?

From Why the West Rules for Now,

"Some people think Chinese sailors even reached the Americas in the 15th C, but, as I will try to show in Chp 8, these claims are probably fanciful. The closest thing to evidence for these imaginary voyages is a map of the world exhibited in Beijing and London in 2006, purporting to be a 1763 copy of a Chinese original drawn in 1418. The map is not only wildly different from all genuine 15th C Chinese maps but is also strikingly like 18 C French world maps, down to details like showing CA as an island. Most likely an 18 C Chinese cartographer combined 15 C maps with newly available French maps. The mapmaker probably had no intention of deceiving anyone, but 21 C collectors, eager for sensational discoveries, have happily deceived themselves."

Further,

"Ming dynasty ships could have sailed to America if their skippers had wanted to. A replica of the Zheng-era junk in fact managed the China-CA trip in 1955 (though it could not get back again)...If they could do it, why couldn't Zheng? The most popular answer is that things happened the way they did because in the 15 C Chinese emperors lost interest in sending ships overseas, while European kings (some, anyway) became very interested in it. When Yongle died in 1424 his successor's first act was to ban long-distance voyages...In 1436 the court refused repeated requests from the shipyards in Nanjing for more craftsmen, and over the next decade or two the great fleet rotted. By 1500 no emperor could have repeated Yongle's voyages even if he had wanted to.

...

By Yongle's standards the Portuguese expeditions were laughably small (involving dozens of men, not dozens of thousands) and undignified (involving rabbits, sugar, and slaves, not gifts from great princes), but with the benefit of hindsight it is tempting to see the 1430s as a - perhaps the - decisive moment in world history, the point when Western rule became possible. At just the moment that maritime technology began to turn the oceans into highways linking the whole planet, Prince Henry grasped the possibilities and Emperor Zhengtong rejected them.

...

As breathtaking as Zhengtong's error now seems, we should bear in mind that when he "decided" not to send shipwrights to Nanjing in 1436 he was only nine years old. His advisers made this choice for him, and their successors repeated it through the 15 C. According to one story, when courtiers revived the idea of Treasure Fleets in 1477, a cabal of civil servants destroyed the records of Zheng's voyages. The ringleader, Liu Daxia, we are told, explained to the minister of war,

  The voyages of Zheng to the Western Ocean wasted millions in money and grain, 
  and moreover the people who met their deaths may be counted in the tens of thousands... 
  This was merely an action of bad government of which ministers should severely disapprove. 
  Even if the old archives were still preserved they should be destroyed.

Grasping the point -- that Liu had deliberately "lost" the documents -- the minster rose from his chair. "Your hidden virtue, sir, " he exclaimed, "is not small. Surely this seat will soon be yours!"

Interesting but not as remarkable as the author seems to think, and certainly the New World parts of the maps are copied from European maps rather than being the result of independent and previously unknown exploration. The “island of California” was a mistake in much earlier maps, which got corrected in the late 16th century and then managed to sneak back into maps again in 1622.

Australia is a bit more interesting — Dirk Hartog had mapped the west coast in some detail just four years previously, though none of the detail makes it in here. Torres and Janszoon had also spotted the northern coast but not mapped it in much detail.

The map is also remarkable as much for what it’s missing as what it has. A pretty good depiction of the Gulf of Mexico, but Indonesia is a bunch of random blobs, and... just one island of Japan?

If you look at a large number of historical maps, you’ll notice that each mapmaker / each country had their own errors (sometimes trivial spelling mistakes, or pairs of cities with the labels swapped, other times comically wrong coastlines or even stuff like California-as-an-island) which persisted for centuries after corrections had been made in maps from other makers. If you compare the errors you can figure out pretty easily which previous map “lineage” was used as the basis for any particular map.

On the "Map of the Myriad Countries of the World" (1602 AD) bears a description near Europe:

"The continent of Europe has over thirty countries. All implement the laws of the past sovereigns. No heterodox doctrines are followed. They only believe in the Lord of the Heaven, the Emperor on High, and the doctrines of the ancient sage kings." [1]

[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=c9G6Eeh-CMgC&pg=PA253&lpg=...

That was ~accurate at the time; that period was more or less peak religious suppression in most of Europe.

It is accurate in one sense and highly misleading in another. Check out the Google Books link. A Chinese bureaucrat reading that description would have imagined entirely different "past sovereigns" (Chinese ones) and "heterodox doctrines" (differing from mainstream Chinese philosophy). By equivocating between established concepts and Christian ones, the Jesuits displayed Christianity as much less of a foreign ideology than it actually was.

One thing I've always found fascinating about Matteo Ricci's maps, is that he is almost certainly personally the direct source of a few names of foreign (to China) lands that have persisted into modern Chinese. That is his translation dictated how future generations would call those lands.

Two major examples are Europe (欧罗巴) and Asia (亚细亚). The article also points out Canada (加拿大).

It's not too often that you're able to trace the etymology of widespread words removed by several centuries to a single person (the major exception for English of course being Shakespeare).

I read recently (don't recall the source) that Shakespeare may not have coined many of the words attributed to him, but is just the earliest known source, since we have maintained much more of his writing than that of his contemporaries or predecessors.

It may be true that many the Chinese names for those lands are the same, or at least very similar, to those used in Ricci's maps; but, suppose you could remove all existing knowledge about what those lands are called in the Chinese language and ask well-educated Chinese speakers to name them base on their Italian (or whatever more appropriate) names, I think people will still come up with very similar names.

The reason is because many foreign words are translated according to how they sound, so phonetic (?) requirements already substantially limit the possible choice of characters.

Since most (every?) character in Chinese has a meaning, I think people generally prefer choosing characters that have neutral to positive meanings, characters that can be put together to form a word or phrase, and/or those that have meanings associated with the actual word being translated.

I think historically there are also "preferred characters" (maybe there is even an unofficial guideline for writers/translators?) when it comes to translating foreign words into Chinese, for example 巴 (bā) is often used for sounds like "ba" or "pa". Some examples of this are the one you have given for Europe (although I think it was likely the "pa" in Europa instead of Europe); Paris (巴黎); and bus (巴士). The same, I think, can be said for most of the characters in the examples you have given.

Perhaps a somewhat related observation is the "divergence" between dialects, where things just don't sound quite right or completely different had they been translated with the same characters. Examples for this would be chocolate (朱古力 in Cantonese and 巧克力 in Mandarin); salad (沙律 in Cantonese and 沙拉 in Mandarin); and very often names for places and people.

Sure, there's some bound to the list of characters reasonable to choose, but Ricci's choice has cemented certain old-fashioned choices which are no longer updated (see e.g. 细). 欧罗巴 indeed is from Europa, but it has persisted as the full name of Europe in Chinese (欧罗巴洲) as opposed to its usual abbreviated form (欧洲).

Indeed there is a series of official handbooks published by Xinhua for a variety of languages dictating how the phonemes in those languages should be transliterated into Chinese.

Ricci's translations do not follow these. Having approximately 400 years of priority lets you do that. The handbooks also generally defer to well-established, preexisting names and conventions where they exist.

Also to answer one of your questions, no not all characters in Chinese have meaning. The more well-known case is purely phonetic characters, although it is quite tricky to find ones that have absolutely no other attested meaning. One example of this is 噶. The less well-known case (I don't know whether the phenomenon even has a standard English term) is of indivisible or "continuous" polysyllabic words, although these words are not always obscure. These are the exceptions to the rule that a Chinese character is a morpheme. Here the constituent characters of the word have no meaning individually and exist only in the context of this word. They are not reusable linguistic units outside of that word.

Some, but not all, of these later evolved to have independent meaning to fit in with other Chinese characters.

My previous comment was a mental experiment for something that I found super interesting; it just kind of leaked out without much, um, thinking. It was definitely not my intention to suggest that Ricci's choice did not influence what is in the language today, not least because this is all new to me (the wrong choice of "historically" probably made things worse).

In any case, thank you very much for taking the time to explain, particularly the part about characters with no meanings!

Edit: typo!

Matteo Ricci is also known for being one of the pioneers of mnemonics. Some of the techniques he employed were known in the middle ages before printed books (in the West), but he wrote one of the first treatises on mnemonics. A Jesuit once told this was because he wasn't allowed to bring books into China and so he had to memorize everything, but I can't find confirmation of this claim.

Any idea why the northern passage was shown as open or why the passage into the caspian and black seas are wide open, those routes would have been very well understood?

Well, these maps are pretty bad, considering they were made in 2010

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