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

Abstract

Reviewed by: East Asian Cartographic Print Culture: The Late Ming Publishing Boom and Its Trans-Regional Connections by Alexander Akin D. Jonathan Felt (bio) Alexander Akin. East Asian Cartographic Print Culture: The Late Ming Publishing Boom and Its Trans-Regional Connections. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021. 318 pp. Hardcover $146.00, isbn 9789463726122. 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 [End Page 95] 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...