Envisioning Islands - Public Lecture Series on Maritime History and Literature Mapping Islands in Early Modern Sinographic Asia

In this talk, I will discuss how mapmakers in early modern Sinographic Asia depicted islands, focusing on world maps and maps of the whole region made in Ming and Qing China, Edo Japan, and Joseon Korea. Many maps of the Ming state include a range of neighboring states depicted as islands, a practice that we can also find on Korean circular world maps. On these maps, state-islands appear next to islands off the Chinese coast such as Hainan, which results in archipelagic Japan being depicted in a similar way as singular islands. When Japanese mapmakers adapted Chinese cartographic models, they made changes to the depictions of islands. By discussing selected case studies from China, Japan, and Korea, I will show how cartographic knowledge circulated in the region and how different attitudes toward mapping islands resulted in the adaptation and transformation of such knowledge.