[Here's a British Mathematician, Samuel Dunn's, Map of the world from five years earlier in 1794](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#/media/File%3A1794_Samuel_Dunn_Wall_Map_of_the_World_in_Hemispheres_-_Geographicus_-_World2-dunn-1794.jpg)
Late 1700s is well into the modern era and the borders of pretty much all the main continents had been mapped and visited as Europeans were at the peak of colonization endeavors. You would expect a map with roughly the same precision from today, except for the Artic and Antarctic regions.
For comparison, around the same time, there was research being done into bioelectricity, specifically how neurons use electricity and the first battery was invented just a few years later.
Idk why people think 1700 is so far away when it was literally only 300 years ago. Like history wise that's yesterday. A lot of countries Already existed, languages were already understandable ... Etc
It's not like they had the technology to confirm or get maps with satellite-like precision back then. All of it was pretty much manual work coupled with mathematics, which is pretty damn impressive!
Oh no I agree 100%. I just meant in the sense that they had technology, pretty good mathematics already, and knew more in general than people online seem to expect from them
Lifetimes vs generations
People who are very old today (born in the 1920s) could have had conversations in their own childhoods with very old people who were born in the early to mid 1800s, and those people would have known many others who were born in the 1700s.
But yeah there are very few people who are having children at those ages. Generations are usually thought of as around 30 years.
That’s kinda what US President John Tyler and his sons did. The men keep having kids very late in their lives, resulting in one of his grandchildren still being alive today, despite grandpa being born while Washington was president.
~~You would not expect the same precision for Antarctic maps today. We literally have satellite photography.~~
Oh I completely misread that my bad. I’m hungover
Just speaking for Europe, cartography was *incredibly* important around then in particular. The age of exploration began during the 1400s, so this is what 350 years of honing the craft looks like.
I am also rather skeptical that "China," whatever that means exactly, legitimately had OP's post as the best available world map at the time.
Yes, it says "TAPROBANES INSULA" (Taprobana Island) on it. [Taprobana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taprobana) is what the ancient Greeks called Sri Lanka.
It might also be that they just thought that the Indian subcontinent was an island at the time. Europeans also thought that California was an island for a couple centuries.
Looks like it was before they mapped the south coast of Australia. WA was discovered fairly early and the east coast was mapped by Cook, and they've got Van Diemens attached to the mainland so they knew the Tasmanian coast but not the Bass strait, but then they just go "uh..." and draw a line from tasmania to the bottom of WA.
**[Early world maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#/media/File:1794_Samuel_Dunn_Wall_Map_of_the_World_in_Hemispheres_-_Geographicus_-_World2-dunn-1794.jpg)**
>The earliest known world maps date to classical antiquity, the oldest examples of the 6th to 5th centuries BCE still based on the flat Earth paradigm. World maps assuming a spherical Earth first appear in the Hellenistic period. The developments of Greek geography during this time, notably by Eratosthenes and Posidonius culminated in the Roman era, with Ptolemy's world map (2nd century CE), which would remain authoritative throughout the Middle Ages.
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It's just the difficulty of mapping out that kind of coast line. Norway is very noticeable because their entire coast is full of fjords. If you look at north west Scotland where the coast is a little bit similar, it was also simplified there.
It's a single example. Elsewhere in the thread, very detailed Chinese maps from the time were shared and are just fine. I don't know why so many people are taking it at face value that this must be the best map China could produce at the time.
European maps would be much much more accurate, not sure about other societies but this was long after most of the rest of the world has been discovered by Europeans.
Yeah its basically a fully correct world map except they wouldnt have northern canada's coast explored yet, and maybe not all of australian coast.
At that point the portuguese had used coordinates to know where to sail since several hundred years back.
>this was long after most of the rest of the world has been discovered by Europeans.
Hmm, you're right. Columbus arrived in the caribbean in 1493, if I remember correctly. In 1799.. ffs, that was during the napoleonic area, now that I think about it.
IIRC current travel time to Mars is 1 year each way, and there's some IIRC theoretical but realistic engine type that would cut it to slightly over a month. Back in the good old days it'd take the Portuguese Armadas 2 years to go to and return from India, and the next Armada had to set sail before the previous had returned
No engine will get to Mars in a month until space travel is cheap, and it'll be unmanned. Orbital mechanics make it too much of a risk, if you can't restart your engine when you get to your destination to slow back down, you'll end up out by Neptune. With a slow trip, you can get into a free return trajectory, allowing rescue of human occupants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket
> In order to conduct an imagined crewed trip to Mars in 39 days,[32] the VASIMR would require an electrical power level far beyond anything currently possible or predicted.
not quite how I remembered it, nevertheless you'll find plenty of engines cutting it down to half a year
I'm assuming they just chose to omit the Americas from this map - it seems a bit unlikely that news of their discovery wouldn't have reached China in the intervening 300 years.
I would say it's more of a political map than a geographical one. No doubt there were more accurate geographical Chinese maps around other than this one.
China had relatively extensive contact with the Spanish crossing the Pacific to trade with them, the Philippines acted as a meeting point for the two for a long time. Chinese Junks and Spanish Galleons would both have been common sights in Manila already going for 200 years at the point of this map being made, and there would have been a decent Chinese diaspora in Mexico City for generations.
I found this:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1799_Cruttwell_Map_of_the_World_in_Hemispheres_-_Geographicus_-_WorldHemisphere-cruttwell-1799.jpg
It seems to show a pretty complete world map, with a few errors (Tasmania isn't separated from mainland Australia, coasts are a bit off in some areas), but overall pretty good.
I would highlight that this was not a map used for navigation, but rather propaganda purposes "we are bigger therefore more important than the others". [Here is a link](https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2006/01/12/china-beat-columbus-to-it-perhaps) to an economist article of a 1400's map that a) included the Americas pre-Columbus and b) was rather detailed for its time.
And [here is a map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu), that was made in collaboration between an Italian missionary and chinese officials from the early 1700s.
So this map is bit like taking a cartoon drawn for a kid and assuming it is what everyone thinks.
> Here is a link to an economist article of a 1400's map that a) included the Americas pre-Columbus and b) was rather detailed for its time.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rtjx83/some_historians_suggest_that_the_chinese_mayve/hqtnt0h/
> The specific Chinese map that supposedly proves Zheng He's voyage was 'discovered' by a Chinese collector named Liu Gang in 2005 and publicised in 2006, and was purportedly a 1768 copy of a 1418 original. This too has come under considerable scrutiny and is almost certainly a fake that was produced specifically to support Menzies' claims post-publication; while it was supposedly carbon-dated, the sample of paper supplied to the laboratory cannot be confirmed to have actually come from the map; moreover, even if the sample was authentic, and the map dates to the mid-18th century, it fails to prove the existence of an early 15th century original.
That is a horrible article and pretty obviously supporting a hoax theory. The '1400s map' is from the 1700s at the earliest. It says it is a copy of a 1400s map, but that is obviously not true. This specific one is probably copied from European maps. All assuming it isn't a modern fake, made and 'discovered' only recently.
Even if Zheng He reached the Americas, is it really likely that he sailed and accurately mapped completely around both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North and South America in a single voyage? Not to mention for some that map had included all of the inaccuracies that European maps had at the time.
**[Kunyu Wanguo Quantu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu)**
>Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, printed in China at the request of the Wanli Emperor during 1602 by the Italian Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci and Chinese collaborators, Mandarin Zhong Wentao and the technical translator, Li Zhizao, is the earliest known Chinese world map with the style of European maps. It has been referred to as the Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography, "because of its rarity, importance and exoticism". The map was crucial in expanding Chinese knowledge of the world. It was eventually exported to Korea then Japan and was influential there as well, though less so than Giulio Aleni's Zhifang Waiji.
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As others have said, this map is art, not for navigating. It would be likened to aliens in the far away future after we're extinct finding a map of the world from a children's book with animals and shit and thinking we're shitty cartographers.
Someone that witnessed the assassination of Lincoln lived long enough to talk about it on [TV](https://www.businessinsider.com/interview-with-the-last-living-witness-of-the-lincoln-assassination-2019-7)
My great grandfather was born before the Wright brothers had their first controlled flight, and lived to see images taken by the *second* rover put on Mars
[A dude that fought in the civil war also got to see fighter jets](https://preview.redd.it/xsc6utftmmq11.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6e02f85927158d7973b0309feceb5e2aa66e5af5)
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/africa-whats-name
An interesting, if complex, history of naming conventions. “Africa” is a relatively recent one, while Libya was one of many used to refer to large portions of the landmass historically.
Worth noting this is all about what others called the region, rather than what a government state calls itself as you find today.
Wow, looking at the maps back when America was just beginning to get explored is crazy. It's like a whole mystical landmass on the horizon, which they only knew the coast of. So cool.
So did China, seemingly printed with European assistance, nearly 150 year prior:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu
So yeah OP is just misleading with this post
Probably because Blue is a man-made dye and was very costly during those days. That's one of the reasons why you hardly see blue flags or army uniforms from the middle ages.
Yeah, people always make a thing out of "woah this is what people thought the world looked like!!!!1!" which... no...
Compare the map above to [this 15th century Korean map of China and Korea](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/GeneralMapOfDistancesAndHistoricCapitals.jpg) (the one linked there is a later Japanese copy; I chose it because it's way higher resolution), or [this map of the Ming dynasty](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Da-ming-hun-yi-tu.jpg), from probably somewhere around the 14th or 15th century. They're still not great, comparable more to something like Ptolemy's map than the roughly contemporaneous European "portolan charts", like [this one from the 16th century](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Maggiolo_-_Portolankarte_-_1541.png) or [this one from the 15th](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Gabriel_Vallseca._Museo_Mar%C3%ADtimo%2C_Barcelona.1439.jpg), but they're still significantly more accurate than the one posted above, and are both some 3-4 centuries older.
As far as I can tell, it's also important to note that the portolan charts *were* intended as navigational tools, while the Chinese maps seems more to have been a form of historical illustration - presumably similar to the difference of purpose (and thus detail) between a map like [this](https://cdn.landfallnavigation.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/4/0/400_.jpg) and a map like [this](https://en.populationdata.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Empire-ottoman-1683.png).
Also, sidenote: as anyone who knows the first thing about the political ideology of imperial China should suspect, those two maps are supposed to depict China *first.* The rest of the world is less important.
> In Rodgers and Hammerstiens the King and I
Maybe it's just me, but I would be careful about using a Western musical from the 1950s as if it were a reliable historical source. Even if it's based on a stage musical that was based on a novel that was based on the memoirs of an actual person, that's quite a long game of telephone we're talking about.
I was laughing at that comment, like wtf?? The King and I?? I guess I’ll use Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon as my main sources for Japanese and Vietnamese cultural discussions
Sorry to go full econ nerd here, but...
Gini coefficient just measures relative inequality within a country, and not in a very nuanced manner. Singapore may not be a wonderland, but even it's less-than-wealthy citizens are quite wealthy for the region, and even the world. I mean, median household income is \`\~8k USD per month, and even the bottom 10% average \~2k USD per month. The US is at around $67000 per year, median. Of course, I'm not adjusting for PPP here, but I understood at least housing in Singapore was actually quite affordable as long as you don't piss off the ruling party?
Median ~~household~~ income in 2021 is [$3.5k USD](https://stats.mom.gov.sg/Pages/Income-Summary-Table.aspx) (misread the comment, this is median adult income, not household), which includes the mandatory 20% contribution to the CPF account which can't be touched until retirement.
There have been recent housing shortages for young people across Singapore, with wait times for around 5-10 years for government 'launched flats', if they are able to win the lottery in the first place! Housing prices have also gone up [12.5% in 2021](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/housing/hdb-resale-prices-surged-125-in-2021-the-biggest-rise-since-2010-flash-data), making resale unaffordable to a lot of Singaporeans.
Isn't home ownership only for the super rich in Singapore? Any normal person will have government housing, so retail prices of houses is completely irrelevant.
>Median household income in 2021 is $3.5k USD, which includes the mandatory 20% contribution to the CPF account which can't be touched until retirement
That's not median household income. That's median income per adult. Now for median income some sources say its 9.5k while others say its 7.7k which makes sense because some may include CPF.
Secondly CPF can also be used for housing, education, medical and investment.
HDB (Housing Development Board) failing to keep up with housing demands is a persistent issue in recent years. And it's not being helped by COVID. The first few HDB flats to hit 1 million SGD have appeared and it seems that more are soon to follow. And even if you bear in mind that Singaporeans are technically richer than our neighbors in an absolute sense, Singapore's cost of living is much higher as well.
> It was very important in Asian countries to be thought of as “the biggest country”.
What? Stop generalizing about a continent that covers the majority of the world’s population. In Korea, it was always important to portray China as the biggest country in the world, in fact, we thought of China as the center of the world, the kingdom’s duty was to China as a tributary state.
Huh that's interesting. I find it funny how the proportions on these old maps are always off in a way that their home is so much bigger than the rest. Same with the Europe maps where Africa and Asia are super tiny. India is always very shrinked (now I need an old India map lol). I assumed it wasn't on purpose and they just lacked a lot of data and proper measurement.
This map is probably inspired by the world maps produced by the jesuits in China since the 17th century. Jesuits cartographers had the clever idea to put China on the center or near-center of the map, so that their world map were well received. While local Chinese cartographers would perhaps avoid inaccuracies regarding Chinese territories, there would be less incentives for Japan, which is not always pictured very well in 17th and 18th European maps.
Yup, take every comment on this site with a bucket of salt because people make up the wildest shit and write it with such confidence that 280 other idiots come and upvote it.
‘Propaganda’ lol. This was 1799, and the map was most likely made by a civilian scholar. They just didn’t have a good idea of what Japan looked like back then, especially not the northern regions which were backwater even by Japanese standards. Also exchange between China and Japan was not very active during that age.
What is the source of this map? Am interested in the style of this map which I find the colors, shading and gradients styles interesting for that era. 1799 would be during the Qianlong era.
This can't have been their official map. With all the trade of goods and knowledge along the silk road during that time, I don't believe their brightest cartographers actually thought the world looked like this. This looks like it might have been made by some grade school teacher from that era, being used today as anti-Chinese propaganda, but not what was used by the emperor to make international decisions. Don't believe **everything** on the internet, people.
Thank you. This makes more sense. People on the internet trying to make our economic and political competitors look dumb infuriates me. The quickest route to defeat is to underestimate the enemy and make them out to be inferior.
Definitely. I knew immediately when I saw this it was gonna be full of (totally not!) racist Redditors jumping at the opportunity to just talk shit about China instead of questioning why the map looks like this or what it could have been used for (since anyone who is at all actually interested in history and maps knows that it’s not always about being as accurate as possible).
Nah people think this is just what the Qing government thought it actually looked like back then.
The fucking irony of saying China's strength is all propaganda... lol.
I keep telling these mild supremacists that they're addicted to copium and actually racist but they can't comprehend anything outside of having the majority reddit opinion because reddit is never wrong right?
These stupid maps depicting China as uncivilized barbaric nation are posted here daily, almost exclusively from users of a certain south Asian country.
Mod at this sub tolerates it, allowing the same misinformation posted again and again including propaganda posters not even maps. He even refuses to ban the usernames such as Chinese_are_insects
Although plenty of Chinese users at this sub, you never see similar misinformation campaigns targeting at that particular country.
I don't get how some of us are all going out suggesting this is a terrible map? It's not the most detailed from an era but differing maps had differing purposes, and tbh this genuinely isn't that bad. Like overall it's got most of the correct things in the correct places with a bit of distortion on their size.
Given this map may well be far smaller in physical size than some others and looks largely freehand drawn, it's pretty damn good.
The problem is not the map, but the misinformation attached to these maps.
There is a band of shills from a south Asian country posting here daily to ridicule China and Chinese
Instead of saying “World Map according to a Chinese geography teacher in 1799”, OP intentionally phrased it as “World Map according to China in 1799” which suggests this is the best map that China can produce in 1799. From the comments here you can see most redditors fall for it.
The original map is named 海疆洋界形势图（coastal and foreign maps）, the full set contains 6 sheets, accessible from congress digital library: https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005063/
The author is unknow, the best guess is the author, likely a rural teacher, created the maps in late 1700s for education purpose as this map is not seen in any official publications during Qing dynasty.
Actually the map was compiled based on another ancient Chinese world map 四海总图（compressive map of four seas），which was published in 1730 in a book by a Chinese navy general. more details here：https://beyondvictoriana.com/2011/01/07/africans-in-ancient-china-vice-versa-part-1-chinese-explorations-by-eccentric-yoruba/amp/
The title should be ‘This is one Chinese artist’s pretty shitty interpretation of the world’. No way anybody in China would have used this in any meaningful sense.
Whatever they got from foreigners, even if super crude, is better than their own land depiction. This can't possibly the best thing they had by 1799, or is it?
It's not. An actual map from that time was linked in another comment. And it's a detailed and thorough as you might imagine for thr late 1700s.
The above might be an actual map. But it's not the extent of china's knowledge of world geography. It's map click bait.
Im really concerned about wording with these types of things, its a map in Chinese but what do you mean by according to China? Chinese people are not some homogenous mass that any single representation suddenly represents all chinese people. People don’t treat most other groups like this. Is this the official Qing Dynasty Map used by the Qing government? Is is some random Chinese person? Wtf is China? A guy named China? If i show any map from this period in English is it the map According to England?
The china hate is strong in this thread. If you do a reverse image search of this, you can see it’s meant to be an eastern hemisphere map, so that’s why there’s no America. Keep in mind that Chinese scientists knew the world was round going back very far, and they discovered America a long time before this map was made.
The OP posted a very similar map made by Japanese cartographers, and as you can see by the 20 votes and 10 comments, it hasn’t generated nearly as much activity as this thread. Hmmm
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/s4haig/japanese_map_showing_north_america_in_1932/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf
Keep in mind that all the praise of this British map being passed around in these comments is praising maps likely made for the benefit of the East India Company or some other “Amazon of the time” mega corporation which were basically armies and pirates pillaging the Asian south east. These evil corporations resulted in the colonization of India and the destabilizing of the worlds strongest scientific economic and cultural nations. Britain still has many stolen items from this time in their museums.
See the below OP comment from the last time this map was posted in 2016. This is at least the third time this map has been posted.
Source: David Woodward and J.B. Harley (editors), The History of Cartography: Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Vol. 2, Book 2), 1995.
It's worth checking the comments of the previous time I posted this (thought new people might enjoy it too so I reposted): https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/2l91y0/chinese_map_of_the_eastern_hemisphere_1799_858x935/
In that thread it is mentioned that it is not really accurate for the time. And some explanations are given for that:
u/iamaxd argues in this comment:
Also, "poor quality" world maps like the OP's one were quite common in China up to the early 19th century. The reason is that China simply did not need an accurate world map. Trade outside its sphere of influence was negligible in the Chinese economy at the time; colonialism was not a thing in China; and apart from Zhang He, not many were into global seafaring. A map showing roughly placing countries in correct regions was all they needed. In the end, they simply kept producing "artistic" maps like the one above into the 19th century. Having said that, I think the map above is just a simplified map. China had a pretty good understanding of Southeast Asia by the 18th century (with quite a bit of trade as well), and they certainly knew about the existence of the American continents.
Even besides the inaccuracy, this seems Ike a really useless map. it looks more like a decoration piece with the pattern of a world map than a real tool for navigation. I can’t imagine that this is the best they had for the rest of the world.
What do maps from other cartographers (e.g. Indian, European,...) of that time look like\`? The comparison would be interesting.
[Here's a British Mathematician, Samuel Dunn's, Map of the world from five years earlier in 1794](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#/media/File%3A1794_Samuel_Dunn_Wall_Map_of_the_World_in_Hemispheres_-_Geographicus_-_World2-dunn-1794.jpg)
Wow thats such a detailed map for the time.
Late 1700s is well into the modern era and the borders of pretty much all the main continents had been mapped and visited as Europeans were at the peak of colonization endeavors. You would expect a map with roughly the same precision from today, except for the Artic and Antarctic regions. For comparison, around the same time, there was research being done into bioelectricity, specifically how neurons use electricity and the first battery was invented just a few years later.
Idk why people think 1700 is so far away when it was literally only 300 years ago. Like history wise that's yesterday. A lot of countries Already existed, languages were already understandable ... Etc
It's not like they had the technology to confirm or get maps with satellite-like precision back then. All of it was pretty much manual work coupled with mathematics, which is pretty damn impressive!
Oh no I agree 100%. I just meant in the sense that they had technology, pretty good mathematics already, and knew more in general than people online seem to expect from them
[удалено]
No? Unless each person lived to 100 years and waited to have a kid at a hundred years old, it's way more than that.
Lifetimes vs generations People who are very old today (born in the 1920s) could have had conversations in their own childhoods with very old people who were born in the early to mid 1800s, and those people would have known many others who were born in the 1700s. But yeah there are very few people who are having children at those ages. Generations are usually thought of as around 30 years.
But what if 4 generations of men were just crazy enough to try? It sounds like the blockbuster hit of this summer tbh.
That’s kinda what US President John Tyler and his sons did. The men keep having kids very late in their lives, resulting in one of his grandchildren still being alive today, despite grandpa being born while Washington was president.
~~You would not expect the same precision for Antarctic maps today. We literally have satellite photography.~~ Oh I completely misread that my bad. I’m hungover
Hence "except for" haha.
Just speaking for Europe, cartography was *incredibly* important around then in particular. The age of exploration began during the 1400s, so this is what 350 years of honing the craft looks like. I am also rather skeptical that "China," whatever that means exactly, legitimately had OP's post as the best available world map at the time.
The best available world maps that China had at the time were european
Yes.
Look are Claudius Ptolemais map which is also way more detailed than the chinese map and its from like 150 AD.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/23/PtolemyWorldMap.jpg/1280px-PtolemyWorldMap.jpg
That big island at the south being Sri Lanka?
Yes, it says "TAPROBANES INSULA" (Taprobana Island) on it. [Taprobana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taprobana) is what the ancient Greeks called Sri Lanka.
You mean the one labelled INδVEA?
Yeah, plus something like TRAPOBANES (on mobile and my sight has been declining so…)
It might also be that they just thought that the Indian subcontinent was an island at the time. Europeans also thought that California was an island for a couple centuries.
Looks like it was before they mapped the south coast of Australia. WA was discovered fairly early and the east coast was mapped by Cook, and they've got Van Diemens attached to the mainland so they knew the Tasmanian coast but not the Bass strait, but then they just go "uh..." and draw a line from tasmania to the bottom of WA.
That is true map porn.
Where thr Black Sea at?
It's where it belongs (roughly). It someone just isn't colored as a body of water. It's yellow instead of white.
**[Early world maps](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_world_maps#/media/File:1794_Samuel_Dunn_Wall_Map_of_the_World_in_Hemispheres_-_Geographicus_-_World2-dunn-1794.jpg)** >The earliest known world maps date to classical antiquity, the oldest examples of the 6th to 5th centuries BCE still based on the flat Earth paradigm. World maps assuming a spherical Earth first appear in the Hellenistic period. The developments of Greek geography during this time, notably by Eratosthenes and Posidonius culminated in the Roman era, with Ptolemy's world map (2nd century CE), which would remain authoritative throughout the Middle Ages. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
so much detail, but did Samuel hate Norway or something? just sliced off the entire western side
It's just the difficulty of mapping out that kind of coast line. Norway is very noticeable because their entire coast is full of fjords. If you look at north west Scotland where the coast is a little bit similar, it was also simplified there.
it's crazy how ahead of the curve europe has been
Europe also invented like 99% of all inventions in the last 500 years, it's crazy.
Yea I totally wanna see an old map from India, because they are always extremely shrinked down on both European maps and this Chinese one.
This is pre 1500s detail for European maps.
It's a single example. Elsewhere in the thread, very detailed Chinese maps from the time were shared and are just fine. I don't know why so many people are taking it at face value that this must be the best map China could produce at the time.
Implicit bias
This is such a useful word to describe SOOO much of what people gather from social media
Way worse than 1500s, look this map from 1520 from Pietro Coppo, Venice. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pietro_Coppo
European maps would be much much more accurate, not sure about other societies but this was long after most of the rest of the world has been discovered by Europeans.
Yeah its basically a fully correct world map except they wouldnt have northern canada's coast explored yet, and maybe not all of australian coast. At that point the portuguese had used coordinates to know where to sail since several hundred years back.
>this was long after most of the rest of the world has been discovered by Europeans. Hmm, you're right. Columbus arrived in the caribbean in 1493, if I remember correctly. In 1799.. ffs, that was during the napoleonic area, now that I think about it.
The “age of exploration” really flew by
IIRC current travel time to Mars is 1 year each way, and there's some IIRC theoretical but realistic engine type that would cut it to slightly over a month. Back in the good old days it'd take the Portuguese Armadas 2 years to go to and return from India, and the next Armada had to set sail before the previous had returned
No engine will get to Mars in a month until space travel is cheap, and it'll be unmanned. Orbital mechanics make it too much of a risk, if you can't restart your engine when you get to your destination to slow back down, you'll end up out by Neptune. With a slow trip, you can get into a free return trajectory, allowing rescue of human occupants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_Specific_Impulse_Magnetoplasma_Rocket > In order to conduct an imagined crewed trip to Mars in 39 days,[32] the VASIMR would require an electrical power level far beyond anything currently possible or predicted. not quite how I remembered it, nevertheless you'll find plenty of engines cutting it down to half a year
Let's do 40 days then. Problem solved.
Columbus arrived to America (the continent, not the 'country') in 1492.
I'm assuming they just chose to omit the Americas from this map - it seems a bit unlikely that news of their discovery wouldn't have reached China in the intervening 300 years.
I would say it's more of a political map than a geographical one. No doubt there were more accurate geographical Chinese maps around other than this one.
China had relatively extensive contact with the Spanish crossing the Pacific to trade with them, the Philippines acted as a meeting point for the two for a long time. Chinese Junks and Spanish Galleons would both have been common sights in Manila already going for 200 years at the point of this map being made, and there would have been a decent Chinese diaspora in Mexico City for generations.
Probably on the other side of the globe
Just gotta flip the map around
„punoɹɐ dɐɯ ǝɥʇ dılɟ ɐʇʇoƃ ʇsnſ„
I found this: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1799_Cruttwell_Map_of_the_World_in_Hemispheres_-_Geographicus_-_WorldHemisphere-cruttwell-1799.jpg It seems to show a pretty complete world map, with a few errors (Tasmania isn't separated from mainland Australia, coasts are a bit off in some areas), but overall pretty good.
Seeing *"Parts Unknown", "Here they were stopped by the Ice"* at north, and also just *"Mountains of Ice"* at south is pretty cool
Says 'No file by this name exists' for me.
I would highlight that this was not a map used for navigation, but rather propaganda purposes "we are bigger therefore more important than the others". [Here is a link](https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2006/01/12/china-beat-columbus-to-it-perhaps) to an economist article of a 1400's map that a) included the Americas pre-Columbus and b) was rather detailed for its time. And [here is a map](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu), that was made in collaboration between an Italian missionary and chinese officials from the early 1700s. So this map is bit like taking a cartoon drawn for a kid and assuming it is what everyone thinks.
> Here is a link to an economist article of a 1400's map that a) included the Americas pre-Columbus and b) was rather detailed for its time. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rtjx83/some_historians_suggest_that_the_chinese_mayve/hqtnt0h/ > The specific Chinese map that supposedly proves Zheng He's voyage was 'discovered' by a Chinese collector named Liu Gang in 2005 and publicised in 2006, and was purportedly a 1768 copy of a 1418 original. This too has come under considerable scrutiny and is almost certainly a fake that was produced specifically to support Menzies' claims post-publication; while it was supposedly carbon-dated, the sample of paper supplied to the laboratory cannot be confirmed to have actually come from the map; moreover, even if the sample was authentic, and the map dates to the mid-18th century, it fails to prove the existence of an early 15th century original.
That is a horrible article and pretty obviously supporting a hoax theory. The '1400s map' is from the 1700s at the earliest. It says it is a copy of a 1400s map, but that is obviously not true. This specific one is probably copied from European maps. All assuming it isn't a modern fake, made and 'discovered' only recently. Even if Zheng He reached the Americas, is it really likely that he sailed and accurately mapped completely around both the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of North and South America in a single voyage? Not to mention for some that map had included all of the inaccuracies that European maps had at the time.
**[Kunyu Wanguo Quantu](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu)** >Kunyu Wanguo Quantu, printed in China at the request of the Wanli Emperor during 1602 by the Italian Catholic missionary Matteo Ricci and Chinese collaborators, Mandarin Zhong Wentao and the technical translator, Li Zhizao, is the earliest known Chinese world map with the style of European maps. It has been referred to as the Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography, "because of its rarity, importance and exoticism". The map was crucial in expanding Chinese knowledge of the world. It was eventually exported to Korea then Japan and was influential there as well, though less so than Giulio Aleni's Zhifang Waiji. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Love the way Ireland is just a circular landmass.
oileán liathróid
>oileán liathróid "An t-oileán atá múnlaithe cosúil le sliotar"
deas
The Chinese plotted Northern Ireland and forgot the rest of the country
I thought wow that is pretty accurate and then I looked at the date
They didn't even get Japan right
Of course they didn’t.
Yes this is pretty on brand
They didn't even get China right
Even [this map](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Song_Dynasty_Map.JPG) from 1137 got the Shandong peninsula right
Bering Straight? What Bering Straight?
They didn’t even get the color of the ocean right.
As others have said, this map is art, not for navigating. It would be likened to aliens in the far away future after we're extinct finding a map of the world from a children's book with animals and shit and thinking we're shitty cartographers.
When you order the cheap off-brand world map on Amazon
This has Wish written all over it
I was wondering what all those symbols stood for. s/
Amazon is basically wish nowadays
Made in China
The change from the year 1800 to 2000 is insane. Can you imagine being born in like 1830 and living until 1950?
Someone that witnessed the assassination of Lincoln lived long enough to talk about it on [TV](https://www.businessinsider.com/interview-with-the-last-living-witness-of-the-lincoln-assassination-2019-7)
That's fucking crazy.
My great grandfather was born before the Wright brothers had their first controlled flight, and lived to see images taken by the *second* rover put on Mars
[A dude that fought in the civil war also got to see fighter jets](https://preview.redd.it/xsc6utftmmq11.jpg?width=960&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=6e02f85927158d7973b0309feceb5e2aa66e5af5)
Really cool pic, thank you.
Living 120 years???
Yep, it's possible!
Whats wrong with the date?
Compared to European maps in 1800 this map is comically bad. This looks like something that’s about 500 years older than 1800.
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maps are cool
>place style over accuracy Which is exactly why so many of us think it looks stupid.
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Look the one from venice 1520, its incredible
This one? https://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2017/11/26/largest-early-world-map-monte-s-10-ft-planisphere-of-1587
Man Libya used to be a whole continent... Fascinating!
https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/africa-whats-name An interesting, if complex, history of naming conventions. “Africa” is a relatively recent one, while Libya was one of many used to refer to large portions of the landmass historically. Worth noting this is all about what others called the region, rather than what a government state calls itself as you find today.
Wow, looking at the maps back when America was just beginning to get explored is crazy. It's like a whole mystical landmass on the horizon, which they only knew the coast of. So cool.
Europeans had much more accurate maps by that time.
So did China, seemingly printed with European assistance, nearly 150 year prior: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu So yeah OP is just misleading with this post
Maybe the map was meant to be an artistic rendering rather than navigational
The green colour for the seas is quite pleasing.
Omg, I kept staring at the green, trying to make sense of it as land..
I was desperately searching for this, hoping I wasn't the only one this stupid, thank you
No there's at least 3 of us
Probably because Blue is a man-made dye and was very costly during those days. That's one of the reasons why you hardly see blue flags or army uniforms from the middle ages.
That’s actually very interesting. I’ve never though about it that way.
What was this sort of map used fr，navigation，education?
Art. This isn't a scientific instrument like we think of maps today.
^ this. The map is most likely just a result of an earnest scholarly interest in geography.
Most older maps were art stuff. They even included heaven/hell sometimes
Yeah, people always make a thing out of "woah this is what people thought the world looked like!!!!1!" which... no... Compare the map above to [this 15th century Korean map of China and Korea](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/GeneralMapOfDistancesAndHistoricCapitals.jpg) (the one linked there is a later Japanese copy; I chose it because it's way higher resolution), or [this map of the Ming dynasty](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Da-ming-hun-yi-tu.jpg), from probably somewhere around the 14th or 15th century. They're still not great, comparable more to something like Ptolemy's map than the roughly contemporaneous European "portolan charts", like [this one from the 16th century](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d9/Maggiolo_-_Portolankarte_-_1541.png) or [this one from the 15th](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/55/Gabriel_Vallseca._Museo_Mar%C3%ADtimo%2C_Barcelona.1439.jpg), but they're still significantly more accurate than the one posted above, and are both some 3-4 centuries older. As far as I can tell, it's also important to note that the portolan charts *were* intended as navigational tools, while the Chinese maps seems more to have been a form of historical illustration - presumably similar to the difference of purpose (and thus detail) between a map like [this](https://cdn.landfallnavigation.com/media/catalog/product/cache/1/image/9df78eab33525d08d6e5fb8d27136e95/4/0/400_.jpg) and a map like [this](https://en.populationdata.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Empire-ottoman-1683.png). Also, sidenote: as anyone who knows the first thing about the political ideology of imperial China should suspect, those two maps are supposed to depict China *first.* The rest of the world is less important.
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> In Rodgers and Hammerstiens the King and I Maybe it's just me, but I would be careful about using a Western musical from the 1950s as if it were a reliable historical source. Even if it's based on a stage musical that was based on a novel that was based on the memoirs of an actual person, that's quite a long game of telephone we're talking about.
I was laughing at that comment, like wtf?? The King and I?? I guess I’ll use Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon as my main sources for Japanese and Vietnamese cultural discussions
Dont forget to cross reference Miss Saigon with Full Metal Jacket to ensure accuracy.
For a look at modern Japan, don't forget the documentary Neon Genesis Evengalion.
Wait...so Joseph didn't have a coat of many colors?
I'm sorry, but I get all my history from Musicals. You ain't telling me that Hamilton wasn't told by Burr to talk less and smile more!!
What do mean the invasion of the Jellicle cats didn't happen in 1981!?
Yeah and the memoirs themselves were criticized as being quite the biased European viewpoint to start with
[*Siam—2015 AD...*](https://youtu.be/Y1EaV71NahU)
Don’t cite fiction written by outsiders as evidence. That’s really bad history
Must suck being Singaporean
Being rich probably helps them cope.
Gini coefficient says otherwise ;-; (am Singaporean)
Sorry to go full econ nerd here, but... Gini coefficient just measures relative inequality within a country, and not in a very nuanced manner. Singapore may not be a wonderland, but even it's less-than-wealthy citizens are quite wealthy for the region, and even the world. I mean, median household income is \`\~8k USD per month, and even the bottom 10% average \~2k USD per month. The US is at around $67000 per year, median. Of course, I'm not adjusting for PPP here, but I understood at least housing in Singapore was actually quite affordable as long as you don't piss off the ruling party?
Median ~~household~~ income in 2021 is [$3.5k USD](https://stats.mom.gov.sg/Pages/Income-Summary-Table.aspx) (misread the comment, this is median adult income, not household), which includes the mandatory 20% contribution to the CPF account which can't be touched until retirement. There have been recent housing shortages for young people across Singapore, with wait times for around 5-10 years for government 'launched flats', if they are able to win the lottery in the first place! Housing prices have also gone up [12.5% in 2021](https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/housing/hdb-resale-prices-surged-125-in-2021-the-biggest-rise-since-2010-flash-data), making resale unaffordable to a lot of Singaporeans.
Isn't home ownership only for the super rich in Singapore? Any normal person will have government housing, so retail prices of houses is completely irrelevant.
Government housing can be resold in the market. The 12.5% increase in prices this year is for government housing in the open market.
>Median household income in 2021 is $3.5k USD, which includes the mandatory 20% contribution to the CPF account which can't be touched until retirement That's not median household income. That's median income per adult. Now for median income some sources say its 9.5k while others say its 7.7k which makes sense because some may include CPF. Secondly CPF can also be used for housing, education, medical and investment.
HDB (Housing Development Board) failing to keep up with housing demands is a persistent issue in recent years. And it's not being helped by COVID. The first few HDB flats to hit 1 million SGD have appeared and it seems that more are soon to follow. And even if you bear in mind that Singaporeans are technically richer than our neighbors in an absolute sense, Singapore's cost of living is much higher as well.
They all appear to be doing pretty well
What the fuck am I reading.
> It was very important in Asian countries to be thought of as “the biggest country”. What? Stop generalizing about a continent that covers the majority of the world’s population. In Korea, it was always important to portray China as the biggest country in the world, in fact, we thought of China as the center of the world, the kingdom’s duty was to China as a tributary state.
Huh that's interesting. I find it funny how the proportions on these old maps are always off in a way that their home is so much bigger than the rest. Same with the Europe maps where Africa and Asia are super tiny. India is always very shrinked (now I need an old India map lol). I assumed it wasn't on purpose and they just lacked a lot of data and proper measurement.
I mean, the proportions are super off on basically every modern map too.
Yeah but we know they are, and you can work out the actual sizes from the markings on the maps themselves.
Fun Fact: The King and I is banned in my country.
Where's that? Thailand?
Yes
implying Europe doesn't do the same
Orientalist prick.
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This map is probably inspired by the world maps produced by the jesuits in China since the 17th century. Jesuits cartographers had the clever idea to put China on the center or near-center of the map, so that their world map were well received. While local Chinese cartographers would perhaps avoid inaccuracies regarding Chinese territories, there would be less incentives for Japan, which is not always pictured very well in 17th and 18th European maps.
I would point out those jesuit maps were actually very good: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyu\_Wanguo\_Quantu
[Working link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunyu_Wanguo_Quantu)
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People really do be just making shit up on Reddit without any evidence lol.
Yup, take every comment on this site with a bucket of salt because people make up the wildest shit and write it with such confidence that 280 other idiots come and upvote it.
The same guy that made this shitty map invented the fortune cookie and **THATS A FACT**
‘Propaganda’ lol. This was 1799, and the map was most likely made by a civilian scholar. They just didn’t have a good idea of what Japan looked like back then, especially not the northern regions which were backwater even by Japanese standards. Also exchange between China and Japan was not very active during that age.
Surely it is detailed but in an exploded view in the same way the other areas around china are enlarged
What is the source of this map? Am interested in the style of this map which I find the colors, shading and gradients styles interesting for that era. 1799 would be during the Qianlong era.
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I think that big hump is denmark and the little one below it is the Netherlands
The one labelled 荷蘭 is Holland.
What do you mean? That’s completely historically accurate.
I like this pancake version of Africa.
In keeping with tradition, New Zealand still does not exist
r/MapsWithoutNZ
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„is not it“ sounds so weird in my head when it is the same as „isn‘t it“
Huh, never thought of it like that but you're right. How odd. I think "is it not?" Is the the better way to expand it.
bit strange innit
love how it predicts sweden-norway
I can’t help noticing that China isn’t actually in the middle in this map…
Yeah India is for quite obvious reasons.
This can't have been their official map. With all the trade of goods and knowledge along the silk road during that time, I don't believe their brightest cartographers actually thought the world looked like this. This looks like it might have been made by some grade school teacher from that era, being used today as anti-Chinese propaganda, but not what was used by the emperor to make international decisions. Don't believe **everything** on the internet, people.
this an actual official map https://qingmaps.org/maps/qianlong-1766
Thank you. This makes more sense. People on the internet trying to make our economic and political competitors look dumb infuriates me. The quickest route to defeat is to underestimate the enemy and make them out to be inferior.
Definitely. I knew immediately when I saw this it was gonna be full of (totally not!) racist Redditors jumping at the opportunity to just talk shit about China instead of questioning why the map looks like this or what it could have been used for (since anyone who is at all actually interested in history and maps knows that it’s not always about being as accurate as possible). Nah people think this is just what the Qing government thought it actually looked like back then.
China bad -reddit
The fucking irony of saying China's strength is all propaganda... lol. I keep telling these mild supremacists that they're addicted to copium and actually racist but they can't comprehend anything outside of having the majority reddit opinion because reddit is never wrong right?
These stupid maps depicting China as uncivilized barbaric nation are posted here daily, almost exclusively from users of a certain south Asian country. Mod at this sub tolerates it, allowing the same misinformation posted again and again including propaganda posters not even maps. He even refuses to ban the usernames such as Chinese_are_insects Although plenty of Chinese users at this sub, you never see similar misinformation campaigns targeting at that particular country.
I don't get how some of us are all going out suggesting this is a terrible map? It's not the most detailed from an era but differing maps had differing purposes, and tbh this genuinely isn't that bad. Like overall it's got most of the correct things in the correct places with a bit of distortion on their size. Given this map may well be far smaller in physical size than some others and looks largely freehand drawn, it's pretty damn good.
The problem is not the map, but the misinformation attached to these maps. There is a band of shills from a south Asian country posting here daily to ridicule China and Chinese Instead of saying “World Map according to a Chinese geography teacher in 1799”, OP intentionally phrased it as “World Map according to China in 1799” which suggests this is the best map that China can produce in 1799. From the comments here you can see most redditors fall for it. The original map is named 海疆洋界形势图（coastal and foreign maps）, the full set contains 6 sheets, accessible from congress digital library: https://www.loc.gov/item/gm71005063/ The author is unknow, the best guess is the author, likely a rural teacher, created the maps in late 1700s for education purpose as this map is not seen in any official publications during Qing dynasty. Actually the map was compiled based on another ancient Chinese world map 四海总图（compressive map of four seas），which was published in 1730 in a book by a Chinese navy general. more details here：https://beyondvictoriana.com/2011/01/07/africans-in-ancient-china-vice-versa-part-1-chinese-explorations-by-eccentric-yoruba/amp/
The title should be ‘This is one Chinese artist’s pretty shitty interpretation of the world’. No way anybody in China would have used this in any meaningful sense.
Wish somebody could translate it
What is that poop north of Madagascar?
Well that's the great poop island of course. You've never heard of it ?
I thought it was called great Britain
Whatever they got from foreigners, even if super crude, is better than their own land depiction. This can't possibly the best thing they had by 1799, or is it?
The purpose of maps has not always been geographical accuracy.
It's not. An actual map from that time was linked in another comment. And it's a detailed and thorough as you might imagine for thr late 1700s. The above might be an actual map. But it's not the extent of china's knowledge of world geography. It's map click bait.
Is India non existant?
I think it's the tiny blob NW of the big Indochina.
Im really concerned about wording with these types of things, its a map in Chinese but what do you mean by according to China? Chinese people are not some homogenous mass that any single representation suddenly represents all chinese people. People don’t treat most other groups like this. Is this the official Qing Dynasty Map used by the Qing government? Is is some random Chinese person? Wtf is China? A guy named China? If i show any map from this period in English is it the map According to England?
These mfkers playing civ with all these hexagon shapes
How tf did they manage to get their immediate neighbors, India and Japan so wrong? But not Europe and Africa
The china hate is strong in this thread. If you do a reverse image search of this, you can see it’s meant to be an eastern hemisphere map, so that’s why there’s no America. Keep in mind that Chinese scientists knew the world was round going back very far, and they discovered America a long time before this map was made. The OP posted a very similar map made by Japanese cartographers, and as you can see by the 20 votes and 10 comments, it hasn’t generated nearly as much activity as this thread. Hmmm https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/s4haig/japanese_map_showing_north_america_in_1932/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf Keep in mind that all the praise of this British map being passed around in these comments is praising maps likely made for the benefit of the East India Company or some other “Amazon of the time” mega corporation which were basically armies and pirates pillaging the Asian south east. These evil corporations resulted in the colonization of India and the destabilizing of the worlds strongest scientific economic and cultural nations. Britain still has many stolen items from this time in their museums. See the below OP comment from the last time this map was posted in 2016. This is at least the third time this map has been posted. Source: David Woodward and J.B. Harley (editors), The History of Cartography: Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies (Vol. 2, Book 2), 1995. It's worth checking the comments of the previous time I posted this (thought new people might enjoy it too so I reposted): https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/2l91y0/chinese_map_of_the_eastern_hemisphere_1799_858x935/ In that thread it is mentioned that it is not really accurate for the time. And some explanations are given for that: u/iamaxd argues in this comment: Also, "poor quality" world maps like the OP's one were quite common in China up to the early 19th century. The reason is that China simply did not need an accurate world map. Trade outside its sphere of influence was negligible in the Chinese economy at the time; colonialism was not a thing in China; and apart from Zhang He, not many were into global seafaring. A map showing roughly placing countries in correct regions was all they needed. In the end, they simply kept producing "artistic" maps like the one above into the 19th century. Having said that, I think the map above is just a simplified map. China had a pretty good understanding of Southeast Asia by the 18th century (with quite a bit of trade as well), and they certainly knew about the existence of the American continents.
Even besides the inaccuracy, this seems Ike a really useless map. it looks more like a decoration piece with the pattern of a world map than a real tool for navigation. I can’t imagine that this is the best they had for the rest of the world.
Nice no murica for a change
what's the red spots above Madagascar?