I’m rereading Peter Hessler‘s Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory. I hope to write a fuller review of this delightful book (and other books by the same author) eventually, but for now, today’s blogpost is about Chinese cartography.
One of Peter’s trips took him on a 3000 mile drive through Western China, from Inner Mongolia to the Tibetan plateau. This trip (and both the time during which the journey was undertaken and the location fill me with jealousy) was sometime in the early 2000’s, and as a consequence, the book is utterly fascinating.
The absolute worst thing that a driver could do was open a map. It was like handing over a puzzle to a child—people’s faces went from confusion to fascination as they turned the map this way and that, tracing lines across the page. One of the first things I learned on the road was to keep the Sinomaps out of sight while asking directions.
Location 1760, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
We’ll have more to say about Sinomaps in a little while, but for now, let’s focus on what Peter writes about next: Chinese cartography. Over time, he says (and he means centuries) Chinese maps “became less analytical and more descriptive”. They increasingly relied on verbal descriptions, rather than visual schema. Here’s how he describes maps drawn of the Great Wall: “huge towers loom atop steep cartoonish peaks, whereas the surroundings lack detail or scale.”
In other words, the maps show military installations, and focus on nothing else. He contrasts this with European and Arabic cartography. The incentives, he says, in those cases, were trade. Merchants created detailed maps of the Mediterranean and later of the African coastline, with enthusiastic assistance from their rulers (Islamic and European, respectively).
These maps were much more detailed, much more accurate and therefore much more representative. But all this is not because European or Middle Eastern folks back then were somehow better at drawing maps, because as Peter Hessler points out in his book, the Chinese had excellent maps of equally good quality sixteen centuries before the Europeans.
Instead, the difference in quality comes down to a favorite question of ours in these parts: what are you optimizing for? In China, back in the 11-16th centuries, maps were drawn up not for trade and commerce, but for military purposes. And very specific military purposes – it wasn’t about territorial expansion, but about defense. Defense against whom? Against the Mongols, and those wars were mostly fought in China’s north and north west. In such a landscape, Peter Hessler points out, specific points (such as huge towers, for example) matter more than anything else. And there is hardly anything else in such “vast and featureless” landscapes in the first place.
And so:
In the end, any map describes not only a region but also the key interests of the mapmakers themselves. During the same century that the Portuguese were trying to access the gold trade of East Africa, the Ming dynasty was protecting itself against northern nomads, and these very different goals created very different schematic views of the world.
Location 1787, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
“What Are You Optimizing For?” is a magical question, and we should be asking it more often.
Now, Sinomaps. What is Sinomaps?
“SinoMaps Press is a public institution under the direct jurisdiction of the State Bureau of Surveying and Mapping.” So begins the About Us section of the SinoMaps website. And back when Peter Hessler went on his envy-generating road-trips, SinoMaps were the only option available.
He grew so fascinated with the maps that he’d been using that he actually visited their offices, and this delightful passage was the result:
Their target market was shifting away from government and military, but they still had an idiosyncratic notion of the private consumer. “We publish many maps of things that people need because of economic development,” Xu said. He meant this literally—the company was attempting to map the things that Chinese people buy. “We publish a Restaurant Map, which shows all the places where you can eat in Beijing,” Xu said. “And we make a Special Tourist Map, which shows not just the famous museums, but also places like Bar Street and Silk Alley.” I mentioned that the old Silk Alley, which had been a popular clothes market, had recently been demolished and moved to a new location. “See what I mean?” Xu said. “Now we have to change that one, too!”
Location 1809, Kindle Edition, Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory, Peter Hessler
Layers on Google Maps, in other words. But in print. And therefore out of date as soon as they have been printed!
EconForEverybody 