Abstract

This paper explores claims of terrestrial centrality in one of the most sophisticated examples of integration of Western and Chinese cartographic practices during the eighteenth century: the map by Lü Fu, “Comprehensive Map of Heaven and Earth”. Its main aim is to demonstrate how the mapmaker of this work consciously stressed China/Asia’s centrality by freely accommodating Jesuit information about the world to his Sino-centric visual and textual representations of the Earth. It argues that the cartographer fulfilled this goal by infusing a sense of symmetry to a cartographic image of a flat earth in which he merged Western information about continents and local information on actual and mythological places. Ultimately, it contends that Lü Fu’s accommodation of Western information into traditional patterns reflects both an attempt to revive geographic information of an ancient lore and to defy new ideas about the world’s layout. The paper further substantiates these points by examining the relationship between Lü Fu’s map, the Korean “tianxia tu 天下圖” (“All under Heaven”) genre, and other previous and later Chinese works, such as the map by Feng Yingjing 馮應京 (1555-1606) “Complete Geographical Map of Mountains and Seas” (Shanhai yudi quantu 山海輿地全圖, 1602) and Xu Chaojun徐朝俊 (1752-1823)’s A Great View of the Maritime Space (Haiyu daguan 海域大觀, 1807).