China at the Center: Rare Ricci and Verbiest World Maps

The Asian Art Museum presents two rare masterpieces of 17th-century cartography, the result of early collaborations between Jesuit priests and Chinese scholars sharing knowledge and curiosity about the world. The 1602 Ricci map, developed by Matteo Ricci while in China, is the earliest known Chinese map to depict the Americas. The 1674 Verbiest world map, created by Ferdinand Verbiest for the Chinese court, is being exhibited for the first time ever.

Through these large-scale woodblock-printed maps, discover how much of the world’s geography and ethnography was known at this early date, including the longest river in Africa, the peninsula of Florida, the fish-skin clothing of the far north and the feathered garb of Amazonian peoples. Two interactive digital displays reveal translations describing the peripheries of the “known world”: lands where giants paint their faces, oceans with mermaids and flying fish, and a kingdom inhabited by foot-tall humans who live in constant fear of being devoured by hawks.

With easy access to GPS technology, the world is now literally at our fingertips. These maps transport us to an age when tremendous effort was required to understand the contours of the world and to record (and imagine) the marvels within it.

我們往往認為地圖是人們籍以從一處通往另一處的工具，是世界地理信息的來源，也是宣稱領土主權和劃分邊界的憑據。它既可標識實際的土地，又可代表抽象的區域：後者如征稅區或冥想靜思時心中的小宇宙。地圖的實質在于它既展示了已知世界，也將幻想世界藏纳其中。最重要的是，地圖令我們得以小窥某個歷史時期、特定地區的人們是如何認識世界及其自身在這個世界中所處的位置的。 

本次展覽的地圖是十七世紀歐洲天主教耶穌會傳教士和中國學者通力合作的結晶。它們既體現了當時中國人對亞洲的認知，也反映了歐洲諸國自十五世紀起通過航海探索對世界其他區域的了解。 

正如所有人一樣，中國人對繪製本國及周邊區域地圖的興趣由來已久。雖然中國的製圖師們很早就製作了成比例的地形圖例，且對地球是球形這一事實有所認識，但通觀中國史，這些觀念卻並不暢行。因此，在公元一世紀的中國天文學家提出天如蛋殼、地如蛋黃的構想的同時，天圓地方理論卻得到了更廣泛的認可。直至十七世紀，中國的世界地圖往往將地球繪成方形，中國在地圖上占主導地位，其他國家則被擠壓至地圖邊緣。 

因此，於明朝引入中國的歐洲地圖呈現出這樣一些激進的思想：世界是球形的，海洋面積大於陸地面積，世界包括五大洲。儘管中國仍處於地圖的近中心地帶，很明顯，中國這一“中央帝國”僅為浩瀚奇妙世界的一小部分。

A Complete Map of the World

Sea creatures cavort in the waves, a six-masted trading vessel sails the Atlantic, and exotic animals populate the southern continent in this monumental eight-panel map.

The world is displayed in two hemispheres, reversing the conventional European positioning so that China and the Pacific are toward the center, with the prime meridian (where the longitude is 0°) running through Beijing.

Made by the Flemish priest Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–1688) with the help of Chinese collaborators, the map is one of the largest woodblock-printed maps of its type. Verbiest arrived in China after the Ming dynasty had fallen to the Manchu-ruled Qing dynasty. Highly skilled in many disciplines, he became a court adviser, working especially closely with the Kangxi emperor. This ruler was astute in using the service of Jesuit missionaries in ways that furthered his own political power and he enlisted Verbiest’s aid with astronomical predictions, calendrical studies and ballistics.

Although Europe and China had contacts via overland routes from the first century CE, records of these interactions are few. Many Europeans learned about China from Marco Polo’s accounts of his time there in the late 1200s.

After ending its journeys of sea exploration in the early 1400s and abandoning trade via the Silk Road, China’s contacts with the West became very limited for almost two centuries, until the early 1600s.

The maps in this exhibition are the product of collaborations between European Jesuit missionaries and Chinese scholars in the 17th century. They combine Chinese knowledge of Asia with European understandings of other parts of the world, which European powers first began to explore through long sea journeys in the 15th century.

Like people everywhere, the Chinese have had a long interest in mapping the lands around them. Although from an early date Chinese mapmakers drew scaled and measured representations of terrain and had an understanding of the spherical Earth, these ideas were not sustained. The idea of the spherical Earth was no longer well known by the 17th century, and Chinese world maps tended to represent the earth as square, China as predominant, and other countries squeezed into the margins. Radical ideas were introduced to Ming-dynasty China with European maps: The world was spherical, had more water than land, and contained five large continents.

The objective of the Jesuits in China was to spread Christianity. But when missionaries arrived in the late 16th century, they encountered a people who believed in the superiority of Chinese civilization and felt the “barbarians” outside their borders had little to offer.

Chinese scholars, however, soon became deeply interested in European sciences, especially astronomy. And it was through astronomy that the Jesuits (many of whom were highly skilled scientists) began to gain the trust of the Chinese elite and eventually became advisers to the imperial courts. The priests accommodated themselves to Chinese culture by learning the language, wearing local clothing and trying to find connections between Confucian beliefs and Christianity.

In Chinese society, the emperor was the mediator between earth and heaven, and much of the scheduling of public life was predicated on the calendars issued in his name. These calendars were calibrated by precise observations of the sun, moon and stars. By demonstrating the advantages of European astronomical predictions (of eclipses, for example), the Jesuits were able to convince the Chinese that European ideas could be valuable. The Chinese were also fascinated by the things the Jesuits brought with them, including clocks, prisms and world maps.

Despite the Jesuits’ significant tenure in China, Christianity was never adopted there on a large scale. But the long association between scholars from East and West led to the transmission of knowledge in both directions and sparked cross-cultural curiosity that continues today.

The museum has partnered with Ideum, a pioneer in the use of interactive computer-based experiences, to create two vibrant 55-inch digital displays that allow visitors to delve deeper into the Ricci and Verbiest maps.

It’s a first for both the maps and the museum. While the museum regularly engages visitors through interactive elements, displays of this size and scope have never been developed. And this will also be the first time these maps, which have had very limited public exposure, will be accompanied by an interpretive element that allows visitors to explore their content so fully.

The most important resource the displays offer is access to extensive translations of the maps’ detailed annotations, which are written in classical Chinese. A traditional element of maps made during this time, these annotations provide intriguing details about distant lands and the people and creatures mapmakers believed inhabited them. The digital displays allow multiple users to zoom in on areas of interest and read a translation of the text in English, in some cases supplemented with curator commentary. For many visitors, the meaning of the map’s Chinese annotations would otherwise be missed entirely.

“This text is just fascinating,” says Natasha Reichle, associate curator for Southeast Asian art and a curator of the exhibition. “You get a real sense of how much the mapmakers knew about the world, and of their curiosity and wonder. At that time, maps like these were not so much tools to get somewhere but objects for your mind to explore.”

The interactive display will also feature related images, such as German artist Albrecht Dürer’s famous 1515 print of a rhinoceros, which mapmakers would have relied upon to develop their own depiction of this exotic animal, having never seen one in person. These supplementary materials provide context about the world in which these maps were made, and the kinds of resources Ricci and Verbiest had at their disposal.

Pairing the maps with a touch-screen experience was a natural fit, and a great opportunity to implement technology that museum staff had long been eager to try out, says Lorraine Goodwin, interpretive media specialist, who managed the project.

“It’s the perfect application of this technology because it really brings the content to life,” Goodwin says.

Main image: A Complete Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the World, 1602, by Matteo Ricci (Italian, 1552–1610), with Li Zhizao (Chinese, 1565–1630), printed by Zhang Wentao (Chinese, dates unknown). China; Beijing. Six-panel woodblock print; ink on paper. Owned by the James Ford Bell Trust, held at the James Ford Bell Library, University of Minnesota.