Stone, Paper, Silk: Yang Ziqi and the Topological Mapping of the Ming State

In the fall of 2015, a stele was unearthed during restauration works at the temple to Confucius in Changshu, a city in the heart of China’s Jiangnan region. It carries the title Dili tu 地理圖 (Map of the Patterns of the Earth) and features a map-diagram of the administrative units of the Ming state, as well as a textual explanation underneath. Carved in stone to display a topological overview of imperial-administrative geography at a prominent site of learning, the stele map is the only such example dating back to the Ming period. Even so, it stands in a tradition of similar stele maps from the Song period and enjoyed a remarkable afterlife that saw its map image and text transferred onto other materials such as silk and paper and, with that, transformed into large maps as well as exquisite albums and fans. Each of these material transformations invited other modes of presentation and consultation that ultimately contributed to the emergence of an early modern geo-body of the Ming state.

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About the speaker:

Mario obtained his Ph.D. from KU Leuven in 2015, after having completed a project that focused on circulation of cartographic knowledge between Europe and Asia at the turn of the 18th century. He is the author of Companions in Geography: East-West Collaboration in the Mapping of Qing China (c.1685-1735) (Leiden: Brill, 2017), for which he received the 2017 Prize for Young Scholars from the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. He is also the co-founder of QingMaps.org, a digital humanities platform that provides a research and teaching tool for the exploration and the study of Qing-era maps. Mario’s research interests are wide-ranging, although his publications have mostly centered on early modern global connections, late imperial China, and the history of the map and mapping technology.