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Movement and Strategic Mapping in Early Imperial China

Though there have been repeated assertions of the general metric accuracy of early Chinese maps, from definitions and explications in various texts it seems they were distilled more from a composite of individual sojourns than from careful survey reports. In this essay, I investigate the etymology of the Chinese term, tu 圖, commonly translated as “map,” and canvass early textual descriptions of geographic space, descriptions impacted or defined by strategic considerations. Such descriptions suggest that map sketches graphically simplified and reduced everyday behavior, rendering the journeys of those who reported on the areas in an abstract form. Early sketches joined, collated, and combined multiple travel reports, the resulting product effectively a ghostly assembly of collected footsteps, delivering to the map user the essentials of what, in a given land space, would hinder or assist movement. If what early Chinese maps primarily record are their informers’ traversing through and inhabiting of space, we must carefully rethink how the markings of lived experience pervade and distort the static representations of the sketch or map.