East Asian Cartographic Print Culture: The Late Ming Publishing Boom and Its Trans-Regional Connections by Alexander Akin

Alexander Akin's monograph, East Asian Cartographic Print Culture, examines cartography and its relationship to the publishing boom of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Its main argument is that "what changed in late Ming cartography is context and quantity more than technology" (p. 36). There were few significant technological innovations in the process of creating or printing maps during this period. But maps proliferated on the printed page to an unprecedented extent. Not only were more books being printed in general, but there were also more types of book that included maps, and the average number of maps in these books increased as well. The remarkable breadth of this map production "reflected the diversity of their users' social interests, spreading far beyond the administration of the state or the training of future functionaries" (p. 36). Akin, furthermore, traces exported Ming publications to Korea and Japan, their reception there, and the return flow of cartographic texts back to China.

Akin's approach is distinctive in its usage and breadth of maps. First, his sources are not magnificent court-sponsored wall maps of limited circulation, but the crudely produced woodblock prints that were used as illustrations in mass-produced books. This allows him to examine maps in their greatest breadth of genres and diversity of uses, from the highest to the humblest registers. Second, because he is examining maps published in books, he reads maps as "illustrations to the text rather than as independent documents" (p. 17). This builds upon the argument of Cordell Yee that, in contrast to European maps, Chinese maps and text were intended to be read together. Akin reads the accompanying text as essential in understanding details not included on the map but intended to be understood through the map. This reveals how the same copied map could be used within different genres for a variety of purposes.

From this argument and methodology, Akin makes three interventions into larger historiographic debates that would be of interest to scholars both inside and outside of East Asian studies. First, contrary to the idea that "Confucian geography" dominated Chinese cartographic thought, Akin shows that late Ming cartography was characterized by a "diversity of coexisting schools of cartographic thought and practice" (p. 15). The proliferation of new works facilitated exposure to Confucian, Buddhist, and Jesuit worldviews, and these contradictory world maps were presented together, without the need to assert a single dogmatic cartographic orthodoxy.

Second, Akin examines the very famous world maps of Matteo Ricci from within the context of an already existing, diverse, and productive Chinese cartographic tradition. Rather than a simple rejection of Jesuit ideas due to Chinese ethnocentrism, Akin shows why neither the Ming government nor Jesuit priests were willing to make the investments necessary to train Chinese students in Western surveying methods—the government because of different educational priorities and the great expenses of survey parties and the Jesuits because of their priority to propagate Christianity. He also shows that the Jesuit map was not really rejected at all. It was reprinted and positioned right alongside other world maps, simply adding it to the diversity of worldviews already present within the Ming cartographic tradition.

Third, Akin presents the East Asian experience as a counterexample to many of the basic assumptions in the general field of cartographic history that are based upon the European experience. For example, while early modern cartographic developments in Europe were driven by state-building enterprises, Chinese map production was largely market-driven. Furthermore, contrary to Benedict Anderson's thesis that a cartographic "footprint" came to Asia only with European imperialism, Akin shows that the proliferation of maps in East Asia during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries produced a "standardization of images of states and their provinces into instantly recognizable forms" (p. 269). He argues that any generalized theory about the relationship between cartography and nation-building or colonialism needs to grapple with the quite distinct cartographic history of East Asia. But Akin also calls on sinologists to make that history more accessible in Western languages and to world historians.

Chapter 1 outlines the range of intellectual contexts and audiences for map publication in the late Ming, including imperial gazetteers, atlases, books on maritime defense, encyclopedias, popular miscellanies, and household almanacs. Imperial gazetteers included the most authoritative and accessible but cartographically crude maps, while atlases included the most cartographically sophisticated maps, with grids and keys. But the encyclopedia maps are the most important for Akin's argument, presenting the breadth and diversity of cartography that Akin identifies as the distinguishing characteristic of the late Ming tradition. Throughout all of these genres, there was significant copying of maps from earlier works and between genres as publishers would rework existing maps to meet new cultural needs.

Chapter 2 singles out historical cartography for a closer examination. The primary market for historical maps was for students studying for imperial examination and administrators assigned to unfamiliar regions. Historical atlases depicted past Dynasties with the same frame of reference—the Great Wall at the top, sandy desert to the upper left, rivers flowing to Southeast Asia on the lower left, and coastline to the bottom and right of the page. This timeless framing facilitated a popularized and immediately recognizable "shape of the Middle Kingdom," and with it "a sense of eternal space" of "grand unity" (pp. 107, 112). One of the few technological developments of this period was bicolor printing, which allowed historical maps to print past and current sites and names in different colors. Finally, Buddhist maps of India and the world are included in this chapter. They were historical in the sense that they presented geographical information from pilgrims of the Tang period (618-907 c.e.) without updated intelligence due to pilgrimages ceasing once Islam displacing Buddhism as the dominant religion of Central Asia. These Buddhist maps were used for meditation on the impermanence of human constructions and on China's small and peripheral position in the world. Historical maps, Akin therefore argues, could be used both to affirm and undermine the Sinocentric perspective.

Chapter 3 examines the Jesuit cartographic project of Matteo Ricci from a "Ming-centric approach," highlighting how the Jesuits made use of the preexisting infrastructure of Ming publishing and how Jesuits "simultaneously challenge and adopt Chinese ideas" (p. 142). Although the Jesuits presented a revolutionary and expansive vision of the world, what was called the "five continents theory," they still printed their maps with Chinese woodblock presses, they centered the map at China, they employed Zhang Heng's 張衡 (78-139 c.e.) ancient egg analogy to explain the earth's spherical shape, and they joined Confucians in anti-Buddhist polemics. The influence of these Jesuit maps within China was discussed above.

In the final two chapters, Akin explores how mapmakers in Korea and Japan responded to and influenced the Ming cartographic tradition. Chapter 4 examines Choson cartography, the major trend of which was creating a national gazetteer modeled after that of the Ming. These national gazetteers produced "a recognizable national 'footprint'" prior to commercial publishing. Korean mapmakers were less accepting than their Chinese or Japanese counterparts of Jesuit and Buddhist world maps. Finally, Akin identifies an example of "reverse influence" in the Chaoxian tushuo 朝鮮圖說 (Annotated maps of Chosǒn), a copy of a Korean atlas that a Ming military official brought to China and then republished there.

Chapter 5 examines Japanese cartography. Although receiving much from the Ming tradition, Japan was distinctive in its embrace of both Buddhist and European cartography. Japan had long been on the periphery of the East Asian world, so Buddhist and European worldviews were far less "fundamentally incompatible with Japan's view of its place in the world" (p. 227). Akin provides many reasons why Japanese mapmakers were far more open to European cartography than either of their East Asian counterparts, noteworthy of which for the larger argument of the book is that Japanese received the "five continents theory" from Ming encyclopedia already shorn of its Christian content. Japan also produced far more Buddhist world maps, incorporating into it updated geographical information from European sources, even including additional continents such as the Americas. The diversity and openness of the Japanese cartographic tradition was facilitated by the fact that it had already received a great variety of Chinese, Buddhist, and European world models prior to its own commercial publishing boom in the seventeenth century.

Akin's writing style is clear and well structured. Most of the book's content is descriptive of the maps and the texts in which they are included. These descriptions are interspersed with analytical explanations and interventions into historiographic debates. The book, importantly, includes frequent illustrations of the maps being described. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters are included throughout the book. There are several appendices, the most interesting of which are a full translation of Ricci's preface to his world map and a translation of the Sancai tuhui's 三才圖會 (Illustrated compendium of the three fields of knowledge) adaptation of the Ricci preface. These translations are very lightly annotated, but they include the original text in Chinese.

There are two rather minor points with which this reviewer finds cause for critique. In Akin's description of Zhang Huang's 章潢 (1527-1608) Tushu bian 圖書編 (Compendium of illustrations and texts), he calls the work a "synthesis and comparison" (p. 66; he also calls the author a "syncretist" and its audience "syncretic," pp. 67, 79). His description of the book demonstrates open inclusiveness, thoughtful juxtaposition, and some evaluation. But Akin presents no evidence of an effort to synthesize or syncretize the diverse worldviews included in this encyclopedia into something new and coherent, something distinctive from its component parts. In contrast, Japanese mapmakers seem far more synthetic in their incorporating of the European five continents model into the Buddhist Jambudvipa maps (pp. 246-252), but Akin does not describe these efforts as synthetic or syncretistic.

I applaud Akin for the considerable attention he gives Buddhist maps and his effort to bring them into dialogue with non-Buddhist cartographic traditions, but it is not entirely unproblematic for Akin to include Buddhist maps in his chapter on historical cartography. Akin justifies their inclusion because their lack of updated information about India and the Western regions since the flood of information in the Tang period renders them "static representations of a bygone time" (p. 125). But this inclusion requires a broadly defined etic categorization of "historical cartography" that seems inconsistent with emic Ming categories. Zhang Huang, in the Tushu bian that is a centerpiece of Akin s sources, presented Buddhist maps in the beginning of his work, with other world maps, not in the latter section of historical maps. Akin s argument in this chapter that "historical maps could also buttress, or undermine, administrative and Sinocentric perspectives" is supported by this choice to include Buddhist maps into his category of "historical cartography" (p. 93). His etic categorization may still be a useful one, but it deserves greater transparency. Neither of these critiques undermine the significant contributions of this book.

Akin has produced a richly sources and highly interesting contribution to our understanding of the diversity of early modern East Asian cartographic print culture. Besides being of interest to East Asianists, historians of European cartography should also take note. Akin is bringing the East Asian experience into dialogue with that of contemporaneous Europe. He is, in his own words, trying to make China not just as an "'exception to the pattern or a special case [in cartographic history], but rather an integral part of the pattern itself" (p. 269).