Map Production

After taking the tour of the map and exploring its contents we learn some important information. First, the map centers on China, but includes the entire world; second, Umemura Yahaku 梅村弥白 reprinted the map in Kyoto; third, the original map was produced in Suzhou by Wang Junfu.

The fact that the map was printed in Japan can be confirmed by a look at its reverse side. Like the Maclean copy, all extant copies of this map are folded and include two covers, a format that is typical for commercial maps in Japan at the time. In Edo Japan, folded sheet maps could be printed in various sizes, ranging from smaller prints folded into tiny easy-to-carry pocket maps to much larger prints. Here the back and front covers are thick paper stock wrapped in blue colored sheets that are glued to the back of the map, typically but not always at opposite corners of the folded sheet and with the front cover featuring a title slip (Fig. 2), pasted in the center of the top cover. Here it reads ‘Map of the Great Ming’ (Dai min ezu 大明繪圖), an abridged title from the proper title found on the map itself.

Fig 2. Reverse, Complete Map of the Great Ming, the Nine Frontiers, with all Countries, Human Traces and Route Itineraries, MacLean Collection, MC26634

Although copies of this map are kept in many libraries and archives in Japan and around the world, the MacLean copy is unique in two ways: first, it features covers that measure approximately 30.4 x 21.2 cm., which results in a four by six grid fold for the entire map, whereas most other Umemura covers measure approximately 27 x 19.5 cm., resulting in a five by seven grid fold for the map. Second, the MacLean copy shows signs that originally the two vertical sheets had been folded separately as a two-sheet set, each sheet with its own front and back covers: the back of the map still bares the blue outline traces of two covers that were removed when the two sheets were later glued together to make a single folded sheet. This suggests that the MacLean copy might have been originally sold as two separate sheets, each folded into their own covers. On the front of the map, this assumption of two separate sheets remounted together is confirmed where the neat line at the bottom center is misaligned as seen near the two characters of the South Pole (Nanji 南極, Fig. 1A).

Fig 1A. Two characters for ‘South Pole’. Complete Map of the Great Ming, the Nine Frontiers, with all Countries, Human Traces and Route Itineraries, MacLean Collection, MC26634

The Umemura family that produced this print ran a print shop at the crossroads of the Gojō 五條 and Teramachi 寺町 streets in the southeastern part of Kyoto. Their print shop was known for bringing Chinese works onto the Japanese print market, including books that rearranged and borrowed from Ming-era works of geography as well as maps. The map's printing can be dated to shortly before 1706, as it is absent from a 1699 Umemura catalogue but appears in catalogues dated to 1706 and 1715 (Kaida, “World Maps”). Scholarship on the market prices of the early prints sold by Umemura indicate that it was a mid-range print with a stable price of 5 monme between 1706 and 1715 (Miyoshi, “Shuppan sareta sekaizu,” 107).

Map Genealogies

As noted above, the Umemura print is a faithful reissue of a map printed in the Chinese city of Suzhou in 1663 by Wang Junfu 王君甫 (act. 1650-80). The Wang map is entitled Complete Map of All under Heaven and the Nine Frontiers, with all Countries, Human Traces and Route Itineraries (Tianxia jiubian wanguo renji lucheng quantu 天下九遍萬國人跡路程全圖, Fig. 3).

Fig 3. Complete Map of All under Heaven, the Nine Frontiers, with all Countries, Human Traces and Route Itineraries (Tianxia jiubian wanguo renji lucheng quantu 天下九邊分野人跡路程全圖), Wang Junfu, dated 1663, ink and color on paper, Harvard T_3080_4643
https://iiif.lib.harvard.edu/manifests/view/ids:46077593

As we have seen, Umemura retained on the MacLean map, in the upper left corner, the original signature by Wang Junfu (Fig. 4).

Fig 4. Detail left, MacLean, detail right, Harvard

At the same time, the re-carving process by Umemura introduced important changes in the contents of the map, most important of which is the production statement flanking the small title of the bottom margin in the bottom right corner of the map. To the right and left of the title, two phrases are inserted in small font: “bookshop in the imperial capital” and “re-issued by Umemura Yahaku” (Fig. 1B).

Fig 1B. Small title detail. Complete Map of the Great Ming, the Nine Frontiers, with all Countries, Human Traces and Route Itineraries, MacLean Collection, MC26634

A second significant change is the replacement of the earlier title's first two characters of Tianxia 天下 (J. Tenka) with Dai Min 大明 (Ch. Da Ming), explicitly referring to the fact that the map primarily presents the administrative structures of a Chinese state that no longer existed (Fig. 5). Beyond changes in print, Umemura's reissue also applied bright colors to highlight rivers and oceans, mountains, and provincial capitals.

Fig 5. Title detail, MacLean (left), Title detail, Harvard (right). The first two characters of the title (right) were replaced.

But the Suzhou prototype by Wang Junfu was not an original work either. Unlike Umemura, however, Wang did not acknowledge the prototype map he consulted. The original map was conceptualized by Cao Junyi (active 1640s), active in the city of Nanjing months before the fall of the Ming-Chinese state at the hands of the Manchus of the new Qing state. Cao had been the first to combine two very different modes of mapping the world (Fig. 6).

Fig 6: Cao Junyi. Complete map of All Under Heaven and the Nine Borders, with Astral Allocations, Human Traces and Route Itineraries (Tianxia jiubian fenye renji lucheng quantu 天下九邊分野人跡路程全圖), 1644, woodblock print, ca. 124 x 126 cm. Courtesy of the British Library.

The first mode of mapping is found at the center of the map, which depicts the political geography of the Ming state topologically, laying out its state-administrative hierarchy among a landscape of rivers, lakes, and famous sights. Surrounding this central part of the map, we find the outlines of the European and African continents to the left, as well as the Americas as two separate islands tucked into the upper and lower corners on the right side of the map proper. For the entirety of its contents, the Umemura print can therefore ultimately be traced back to Cao's map, which was printed in the city of Nanjing in 1644, on the eve of the Manchu-Qing invasion of Ming China. Although Cao Junyi can be credited for this combination of two modes of mapping onto one large map, he also cut and pasted from existing maps that were available on the vast print market of mid-seventeenth century China. For the central depiction of the Ming state's administration, Cao copied a large map printed in 1643 by Ji Mingtai (no dates), a gifted young printer who was also active in Nanjing but who would move his business to the city of Suzhou after the Ming-Qing transitional war.

For the continental outlines and place names in the periphery of the map, Cao copied from the first widely printed work that brought European maps onto the Ming book market, the Record of Everything Beyond the Administration (Zhifang waiji 職方外紀). The book, co-edited in 1623 by Yang Tingyun (1557-1633) and Giulio Aleni (1582-1649), the latter a Jesuit missionary to China, included a world map entitled Complete Map of All Countries (Wanguo quantu 萬國全圖). From this world map, which essentially transposed the Renaissance worldview into Chinese book culture, Cao copied all continents and place names outside of Asia into the periphery of his map (Cams, 2024).

Umemura's print is thus indebted to an important genealogy of printed maps with their roots in late Ming China's print culture. This is no mere coincidence: Japanese intellectuals floated the idea that Japan could replace China as the new Central State of the region. The Ming state had disappeared after being overrun by foreign invaders, losing its heavenly mandate and creating the conditions for Japan, spared from the invasion, to take over the “mandate of heaven” (Yonemoto, Mapping Early Modern Japan, 103-108). Perhaps it was this intellectual context, and the reading public's search for understanding the dramatic seventeenth-century changes in China, that created the market for Umemura's re-issue.

In sum, the MacLean map constitutes a reprint of a reissue of a creative combination of two separate maps printed in the first half of the seventeenth century in Nanjing, binding together a genealogy of maps that sheds light on a culture of recombining and copying, crossing temporal and spatial boundaries from Ming to Qing China, and from Qing China to Edo Japan.