Mapping the Ming World: Globalizing a Seventeenth-Century Vision of China

In Mapping the Ming World Mario Cams explores how seventeenth-century China reimagined its place amid a rapidly changing landscape of global connections. At the heart of this study is a remarkable map printed in 1644, just after the fall of Beijing and the suicide of the last Ming emperor. This visually striking artifact places a diagram of the Chinese state at its center, surrounded by elements of Renaissance-style world maps—an imaginative fusion that reshaped spatial thinking across East Asia and informed European audiences about the region for generations.

Through a rich analysis on the cognitive, social, and material levels, this book reveals how Chinese scholars and printers responded to an influx of foreign knowledge, crafting a new spatial imaginary that was both globally informed and locally grounded. It traces the map’s origins to the vibrant print culture of the late Ming period, the collaborative networks of Chinese and European actors, and a long-standing tradition of visualizing empire on large-format maps carved in stone, painted on silk, or printed on paper.

Mapping the Ming World offers a fresh lens on the global history of cartography, showing how a single map can help unlock a deeper understanding of how identity, empire, and world order were negotiated. It will appeal to historians, scholars of East Asia, cartography enthusiasts, and general readers interested in how visual language shaped, was shaped by, and continues to shape global encounters past and present.

• Mario Cams, Author

  Mario Cams is associate professor at KU Leuven.

• This masterful study of a single cartographic object, Cao Junyi’s epochal 1644 map of China-in-the-world, signals a paradigm shift in the history of Chinese cartography. It replaces the received history of Chinese cartography—a model in which a Chinese/European binary informs a singular positivist teleology—with a model in which multiple modes of mapping operate simultaneously within dynamic social, intellectual, and material networks. In a close and comprehensive analysis of Cao’s map and its historical contexts, the author reveals how cartography does not simply reflect an existing geographic order, but actively negotiates and proposes new possibilities of China’s place in a changing world. In doing so, the author suggests the contours of a new kind of history of cartography, one that may offer something closer to a cartography of history: the use of material artifacts to analyze the expectations, contentions, and transformations of the Ming/Qing transition.
  —Max Moerman, Bernard College
• This book is a pleasure to read for all educated audiences. It is clear and lucid, free from jargon, straightforward in its argumentation without posturing or gratuitously criticizing other scholarship. Cams argues cartographic modes are multilayered, fluid and permeable, they move in unexpected ways and are appropriated, transformed, reimagined and recreated in multiple contexts and forms for varied purposes. Maps, it turns out, are far more complex containers of multiple visions of both China and the world within which that empire is imagined. It is erudite, and it carries this very lightly.
  —Anne Gerritsen, University of Warwick