Word: ricci
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...April. The map is so rare - only six copies are known to exist - that to a fan of cartography, its exhibition is a bit like giving a devout Christian a chance to hold the Holy Grail. Prepared for the court of Emperor Wanli of the Ming dynasty by Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary in Beijing, the map places China at the center of the world, just where Chinese scholars thought (and think) appropriate. It was purchased last year by the James Ford Bell Trust from a Japanese collector and will move to permanent display at the University of Minnesota after...
...Ricci, an Italian polymath, was perhaps the most talented of an extraordinary collection of Jesuits who went to China in the 16th and 17th centuries, taking Western learning with them. It was not a one-way exchange: Ming China was no slouch when it came to science and technology, and China's cartographic tradition was long and rich. Ricci's map is thought to be the first Chinese representation of the world as a sphere. But the map is at its most detailed in its depiction of China itself, an indication, as Professor Cordell Yee of St. John's College...
...those used to antique Western maps, Ricci's work - displayed here on six tall screens - is not especially beautiful. The map is densely covered not with gorgeous cartouches and drawings of unicorns, whales and horrible monsters of the land and sea but with text, including endorsements from Ricci's Chinese friends and passages naming territories ("Ka-na-ta," for example) and describing the habits of those who live there. That's how we can be sure that Ming China knew about hammocks. In parts of South America, Ricci wrote, "men sleep without beds or mattresses, but make nets of knotted...
Seventeenth century Chinese, of course, would have grasped the aesthetics of the map quite differently from the way Occidentals do today. In China, "calligraphy is a visual art," says Yee. Combining European learning with Chinese artistic tradition, Ricci worked to make his map (and his mission) attractive to his Chinese hosts. Ricci, Yee says, "knew his stuff...
That he did. But the display of Ricci's great map is a chance to do more than just gawk at his achievement. There is a popular tendency in the West to see China's modern engagement with global society as something brand-new, the sundering of a hermetic seal by which China walled itself away from everyone else. This is quite false. China has been open to other cultures - and influenced them in its turn - for centuries. There's nothing preordained about how its modern rise will play out; much will depend on the skill with which China...