Lidai fenye yutu gujin renwu shiji [Map of Past Dynasties with Figures and Deeds of Past and Present], dated to the jiwei year of the Kangxi reign (in accordance with 1679)

Kyoto Private Collection.

Diligently inscribed, richly hand-coloured and excellently preserved after more than three centuries, the present map is an exceptionally rare example of early Qing cartography at its finest.

To date, only one other copy of the present map appears to survive, preserved uncoloured and with significant losses to the upper register in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (Classmark Sinica 92) and recorded in Li Xiaocong’s seminal Descriptive catalogue of pre-1900 Chinese maps seen in Europe, Beijing, 1996, p. 157. Aside from this example, all known editions of the Lidai fenye yutu gujin renwu shiji appear to be later Japanese revisions, based on the 1750 edition produced by Miyagawa Choshun, engraved by Shoda Masahide and Sakaguchi Kazuyoshi and published by Suharaya Mohei. These copies can be easily distinguished by their more floridly decorated borders and title slips, larger size (ca. 200 x 170 cm) and revisions made to the description of Japan in the lower right corner.

Maps of this extraordinary quality, rarity and early dating very seldom appear on the market and are almost exclusively preserved in the world’s leading libraries and institutions. Compare three such examples from the late Ming and early Qing dynasties produced in the same milieu as the present example and likely serving among its inspirations: Jiuzhou fenye yutu gujin renwushiji, preserved in the University of British Columbia, Vancouver (Classmark Asian Rare-5 no. 35) and Huangming fenye yutu gujin renwu shiji, in the Harvard-Yenching Library, Cambridge (Classmark T 3080.7 2686), both attributed to Li Minghua and dated in accordance with 1643, the latter likely the original;  and Da Ming jiubian wanguo renji lucheng quantu, attributed to Ming loyalist Wang Junfu, dated in accordance with 1663, and preserved in the National Museum of Taiwan History, Taipei (accession no. 2018.021.0004).

The history of Chinese cartography stretches back over two millennia and reflects a distinctive intellectual tradition in which geography, history, cosmology, and moral order were deeply intertwined. Unlike the specialized, technical cartography that developed in Europe, Chinese maps were primarily the product of the scholar-official class. They were conceived less as instruments of navigation and more as embodiments of political authority, cultural memory, and cosmological harmony. Thus, while European cartography had already reached China by the sixteenth century with the arrival of Jesuit Matteo Ricci and his Shanhai yudi quantu [Complete Map of the Earth’s Mountains and Seas] of 1584, by the seventeenth century, Chinese mapping had largely returned to the traditional Sinocentric designs grounded in Song dynasty designs like that of the famous Huayi tu [Map of China and the Barbarian Peoples] of 1136. Centering China at the heart of the map, distorting proportions to highlight the centrality of her rivers and capitals, the present map is no exception.