
Early Chinese World Maps (2010) - benbreen
https://resobscura.blogspot.com/2010/09/wanguo-quantu.html
======
peteretep
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...](https://www.1843magazine.com/travel/cartophilia/did-china-discover-
america)

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

~~~
peteretep
> No one said

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

~~~
avaku
I guess they deleted that part now :)

------
larnmar
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?

~~~
jacobolus
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.

------
bigpumpkin
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=...](https://books.google.com/books?id=c9G6Eeh-
CMgC&pg=PA253&lpg=PA253#v=onepage&q&f=false)

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

~~~
yorwba
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.

------
dwohnitmok
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).

~~~
hmwhy
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.

~~~
dwohnitmok
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.

~~~
hmwhy
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!

------
mywacaday
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?

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

