Organizer: Mark Elliott, University of California, Santa Barbara
Chair: Joanna Waley Cohen, New York University
Discussant: Evelyn Rawski, University of Pittsburgh
The panel proposed here would present some new work being done on the links between mapmaking under the Qing and the Manchu imperial enterprise in Inner and Central Asia. The presenters include Mark Elliott, a historian specializing in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century China and the use of Manchu language sources; Philippe Forêt, a geographer whose primary interest is the Qing manipulation of space and landscape; and Marina Tolmacheva, a historian specializing in Islamic and early modern European cartography.
There was a time in the academy when history and geography were closely linked as sister sciences, a link as close in Asia (whence the classic Chinese term lishi dili) as in Europe and North America. For most of the twentieth century, however, this connection has been lost in the West. Maps are commonly thought of as tools-teaching and research aids convenient to have, but little more. Within the last five years, however, there has appeared a new kind of historical geography, a branch of scholarship some are calling "cultural and social cartography." Relying on historical and geographical knowledge as well as on new theoretical treatments of cultural space, this work examines maps as historical documents, texts like any other ready to reveal to the reader the different constructions of reality lying behind their compilation. This shift involves both geographers and historians in an effort to discover new significances both in maps and in the highly political processes of mapmaking.
Our panel promises findings to suggest the valuable contributions that cultural and social cartography have to make to scholarship on Qing Inner Asia, itself a field that is gradually coming into its own as an area of inquiry separate from, though closely related to, the major body of scholarship that has been building over the last 40 years on Qing era China. Elliott examines a number of important Qing period maps to show how maps were drawn up as statements claiming certain political rights. He goes on to compare this pattern with roughly contemporaneous European uses of cartography, combining this with an analysis of the language used in maps to suggest some new ideas about the Manchu-Qing concept of empire and sovereignty. Forêt proposes some new categories for viewing the shift in Chinese cartography from traditional ways of mapmaking to the use of new methods influenced by the Jesuit missionaries active at the Qing court. He suggests that in fact a separate and distinctly Manchu hybrid topology can be found operating in early eighteenth century maps. Finally, Tolmacheva provides a crucial perspective on the formation and mapping of the Qing frontier with Russia. Her exploration of the Russian mapmaking efforts here provides an illuminating comparison with Qing efforts; she also shows that the coming into contact of these two empires was a cartographic event that saw rapid and extensive exchanges of methods and information between Russia, Western Europe, and China. Our discussant is Evelyn Rawski, a well known expert on many aspects of Chinese history, particularly Qing history and relations with Inner Asia. Her comments are certain to provide further valuable insight onto the general problem of Qing "imperialism."
The combination of approaches found among these panelists, distinguished both by linguistic/national concentration as well as by discipline, should ensure a very full treatment of the question of the definition, through maps and their creation, of the Qing empire in Inner Asia, and at the same time point out to scholars some radically new ways of thinking about and using maps.
Philippe C. Forêt, University of California, Berkeley
The transition from traditional to modern cartography in China has been well analyzed but remains ill defined as scholars have failed to understand the normative and prognostic nature of Chinese maps. The purpose of this paper will therefore be to investigate what has been for us the confused relationship between modern and traditional cartographies. The paper will focus on the attempts made at the turn of the eighteenth century at mapping areas in or near Manchuria. Maps of four specific sites-Changbaishan, Mukden, Dongling (the Eastern Tombs), and Chengde-will be compared and analyzed. Examination of the Qing emperor's definition of an ideal site will lead to the discovery of the facets of Manchu topological modernity.
I will claim that our perception of this epistemological change in spatial representation has remained largely influenced by the contemporary European readers of these maps: in eighteenth century Paris, cartographers and geographers were barely aware of the existence of cultural notions about space different from their own. In their translations from Manchu and Chinese into French, the Jesuit missionaries of Peking undervalued the importance of geomancy that was manifest in landscape architecture, urban planning, cartography, and imperial poetry. In fact, not only did Chinese planimetric maps continue to be produced, but they influenced the features of contemporary Qing maps by sharing the qualities that traditional Chinese maps granted to the landscape they illustrated. The most significant of these qualities is the ability to foretell the future by producing maps that represented archetypal sites believed to be auspicious for the emperor and the continuity of the dynasty. This concern for time is, of course, absent in modern cartography.
The inclusion of geometric notions applied to the maps commissioned by the emperor was the prerequisite for both the beginning of the survey of the empire and the passage to modern cartographic times. Done under the Kangxi emperor's close supervision, the mapping of the Qing empire was a major project of several decades that resulted in the compilation of astronomically based maps known together as the "Kangxi Atlas." The atlas and its many revisions contributed to the formation of the modern conception the Qing state had about space and policy. On the basis of the Kangxi emperor's instructions and the reports of Jesuit cartographers such as Father Thomas Pereira, I would propose an interpretation of the maps that would reveal the Qing accommodation of new notions about locale.
Marina Tolmacheva, Washington State University
When, in the year 1805, Russian vessels entered a Chinese port (Canton) for the first time, this marked a turning point in Russo Chinese diplomacy, which had previously been conducted only overland. The Russian knowledge of geography and navigation helped to shift the power balance in Russian favor and eventually led to significant territorial gains consolidated by the Treaty of Peking (1860).
This paper attempts to develop a periodization of the Russian exploration and mapping of East Siberia, the Russian Far East, and Mongolia. The several stages reflected changing priorities and policies of the Russian state, the configurations of neighboring domains, and the variations in the Russo Chinese balance of power. Trade, settlement, and issues of sovereignty commanded in various degrees the attention and commitment of tsarist officialdom, the military, Russian settlers, and diverse groups of merchants.
Russian cartography of the eastern frontier is illustrative of these concerns and their various sources. The early Route Books describe river routes and forts used by the traders and Cossacks. The Spathary embassy of 1675 explored and mapped the riverways east of Lake Baikal. The Remezov Atlas of 1701 became a major reference not only for Russian state mapmakers but also for Western European cartographers. Beginning with Peter the Great, Russian monarchs invited a number of Western scholars to travel to Siberia and map the settled Russian areas and frontier regions. The resulting maps document both the expanding boundaries of the Qing empire and increasing Russian knowledge of East Asia. The early Russian embassies sought Chinese maps, but later, benefiting from the stability of the border negotiated under the Treaty of Nerchinsk (1689), Russians conducted independent surveys. The Russian presence on the Pacific and the cartographic information on the Amur Ussuri region became crucial advantages in the later successes of Russian diplomacy with the Qing.
Mark Elliott, University of California, Santa Barbara
During the first 120 years of Qing rule in China, Manchu monarchs displayed a very strong interest in maps and mapmaking. First under the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722), and continuing under the Qianlong emperor (1735-1796), numerous maps of the empire were commissioned, including, among others, the Da Qing yitong tianxia quantu (1714), the Huangyu quanlantu (the so called "Jesuit atlas" or "Kangxi tu") (1718), and the Qianlong revision of the same, the Qianlong neifuben ditu (1744). Much of this interest can be traced to the stimulation afforded by new surveying and cartographic techniques introduced by the Jesuits, techniques which it is widely recognized the Kangxi emperor held in great esteem. Yet it must not be thought that this was idle curiosity on the part of the monarchy. As concrete representations of the extension of their power, the maps sponsored by the first Qing emperors were the product of inchoate Manchu ideas of sovereignty over a steadily expanding realm. This paper explores what maps have to tell us about these ideas and about the Qing imperial vision generally, by focusing on a number of important maps dating from the early Qing. In addition to those in Chinese and Manchu, the paper will also look at some of the European maps made in China at the time, such as the Mappe Monde ou Carte Générale de la Terre divisée en deux hemisphères (1694), given the Chinese title Tianxia quantu and the Manchu title Di kio nirugan
A map can of course serve a range of purposes, but an examination of Qing maps from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals the primary goals of the Qing cartographic enterprise: defining frontiers, setting boundaries, and improving geographic and strategic knowledge of previously little known domains being encompassed under Manchu sovereignty. Earlier work on the subject of Qing maps-mostly pre war scholarship in German and French-though exact, was little concerned with the relationship between cartography and the state. Recent scholarship on early modern Europe shows the various ways in which maps were called on in sixteenth and seventeenth century England, France, and Austria to define political (as well as other kinds of) space. My paper takes up such work, together with new theoretical considerations of the nature and creation of space, to suggest the ways in which the Qing delimitation of certain frontiers was distinctly "modern." This in turn prompts a reexamination of how the Manchus defined their empire, and of the ways in which this definition departed from earlier Chinese conceptions of territory and sovereignty.
Would you like to return to the China & Inner Asia Table of Contents? Choose another area?