Images Only? The Visuality and Textuality of Cartography in Modern China

In the 1934 preface to the second edition of The New Atlas of Province-Based China (Zhongguo fensheng xinditu), Ding Wenjiang (1887-1936) highlighted an anonymous review. In 1930, Ding and two colleagues began mapping the entire territory of republican China. The New Atlas of Province-Based China was a significant success, both academically and commercially. It received enthusiastic praise from domestic and international scholars for its “scientificity.” However, Ding noticed the anonymous criticism almost buried in the celebration, which questioned the textual sparsity of the atlas. Ding denied the textuality of cartography and attributed their disagreement to the clash between the “new” and “old,” modern and traditional. What distinguished “new” cartography from the old was its visuality. The reviewer insisted on the traditional cartographic practice that combined images and qualitative texts, while Ding and his peers argued that geographical information should and can be entirely quantifiable, presented in scale maps.

The paper documents the tension between visuality and textuality in nineteenth- and twentieth-century China. For centuries, Chinese scholars used visual-textual hybrids, such as illustrative gazetteers (tuzhi), to present relative locations. In the nineteenth century, the new international order required the Qing empire to shift to visual tools for quantifying spatial relationships. However, the demand for visually focused cartography could not, for a long time, suppress the market for traditional visual-textual hybrids, which were republished and reprinted. Chinese cartography witnessed the coexistence of visuality and textuality until the mid-twentieth century.