In 1602, the Wanli Emperor of the Ming dynasty had a big task for his scholars: a map that would depict the entire world.
The results was a monumental map that would forever change China’s understanding of its place in the world. Known as the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu (坤輿萬國全圖), or A Map of the Myriad Countries of the World, this colossal artifact was the result of an unprecedented collaboration between an Italian Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, and a team of Chinese scholars, including Li Zhizao.
Measuring over 12 feet wide, it was the first map to show the Americas to the Chinese people and depicted a spherical world with stunning accuracy for its time. It also placed China at the center, showcasing the country’s ambition. But more than everything, this map became a catalyst for commerce.
A mapmaker’s gambit
The map was born from a clever strategy. Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest trained in European mathematics and astronomy, arrived in China in 1583. Ricci, who was skilled in mathematics and cartography, mastered the Chinese language and writing quickly. However, he realized that preaching at the Ming court is bound to fail. So instead, he pursued a different strategy, immersing himself in Chinese culture and basically marketing himself as a scholar.
He used European technology (clocks, prisms, and maps) to win the respect of the Chinese elite, hoping that this would open them up to the Christian faith. At the time, only a handful of Chinese people in Macau were open to Christianity, and Ricci hoped to change that.
He gained some recognition, but a key turning point happened in 1592, when Ricci predicted a solar eclipse with greater accuracy than the astronomers of the Chinese court. Eclipses played an important role in Chinese myth, and hearing of his feats, Emperor Wanli invited Ricci to Beijing. In Beijing, Ricci translated Euclid and other works into Chinese. Eventually, he was asked to become an advisor of the court and start work on the map.
The final product was a marvel. Printed on six panels of fine mulberry paper, it was designed to be mounted on a folding screen, a format befitting a palace. Ricci based in on European models, he hadn’t made any new geographical discoveries himself. However, Ricci made a brilliant diplomatic adjustment. Instead of centering the map on Europe, he shifted the map’s prime meridian to the Pacific Ocean, placing the Ming Empire at the heart of the world. This flattered the Chinese worldview of their nation as the “Middle Kingdom” (中國), making the radical new geography far easier to accept.
A bridge between worlds
The map was a trove of new information, covered in detailed annotations. It showed the Americas, which were known to the Europeans for a century but were largely unknown to China. He labeled Canada (加拿大, Jiānádà), Florida as Huādì (花地, “Land of Flowers”), and mentioned “humped oxen” (bison) and feral horses. He also added places like Wādemálá (哇的麻剌, Guatemala), Yǔgétáng (宇革堂, Yucatan), and Zhīlǐ (智里, Chile). He even mentioned a mountain range in Bolivia called Potosí. This was the site of the vast Spanish silver mines that were already transforming the Chinese economy through global trade.
Africa was described as having the world’s highest mountain and longest river, while Europe was presented as a continent of over 30 Christian monarchies. To mark it all, on the side, he mentioned some celestial facts, including diagrams of the cosmos (the Nine Skies), explanations for eclipses, and proof that the Sun is larger than the Moon.
This revolutionized Chinese map-making. Chinese maps were sophisticated but they were missing several key elements. They generally depicted a flat, square Earth with China as the vast, civilized center, surrounded by smaller “barbarian” states. The dogma in China at the time was that the Earth was flat, and it was European astronomy that shifted this.
The map cleverly placed China at its physical center, but it showed China as one country among many, and by no means the largest. The visual evidence of other great continents and civilizations proved to be as tough to swallow as the idea of a spherical Earth.
The map was an instant hit. Ricci estimated that over 1,000 copies of the 1602 edition were made and circulated, and the demand was so high that it spawned a market for unauthorized reproductions. Its influence quickly spread beyond China’s borders, becoming a critical document for transforming worldviews across East Asia. It even reached isolationist Japan, one of the few windows the country had opened to the outside world. In Korea, the map was highly regarded as a symbol of sophisticated Ming culture.
Yet the legacy of the map was not quite what Ricci was hoping for.
The “Black Tulip” of maps
Ricci was a Jesuit priest whose mission was to convert the Chinese to Roman Catholicism. He wanted to use the map to demonstrate a superior view of the world that grew out of the Christian faith. He made many clever diplomatic changes and famously said the map offers testimony “to the supreme goodness, greatness and unity of Him who controls heaven and earth.”
The map was popular, but it didn’t really convince people to turn to Christianity. Matteo Ricci’s approach was to convert the emperor and the scholar-officials first, believing that the rest of the country would then follow. The map was a key part of this “top-down” strategy. He and his Jesuit fellows got a few high-ranking officials to turn, but the emperor wasn’t convinced.
The Christians were also inflexible. Whereas with Roman or Viking cultures, Christianity bloomed by merging with and ultimately absorbing some parts of existing cultures, in China, they demanded exclusivity. The idea that one should worship only one God was alien to Chinese culture, which was tolerant of multiple religious and philosophical traditions (Confucianism, Buddhism, Taoism) coexisting. So it didn’t really work.
But Ricci did gain the respect of the elites at the time, and set in motion things that would influence how China sees “the West” for centuries. The map popularized the term Dàxīyáng (大西洋), or “Great Western Ocean,” as the Chinese name for the Atlantic. This became a powerful geopolitical concept, creating a category for a distant but significant “West” in the Chinese imagination that would define Sino-Western relations for centuries.
As for the map itself, despite being so popular, it is almost impossible to find nowadays. Kunyu Wanguo Quantu is so rare that it has been nicknamed the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography” and only a couple of copies survive to this day. In 2009, one of the best-preserved original copies was purchased by the James Ford Bell Trust for $1 million. At the time, this was the second-highest price ever paid for a map in history. The Vatican owns a copy, as do several universities in Japan. A copy also exists in a private collection in Paris.
Curiously, no known copies survive in China. Despite being such a generative seed, sprouting new forms of knowledge and new ways of seeing the world across East Asia, the map itself is almost gone.
Yet its legacy endures. It is a map of the world that, in its very making, redrew the intellectual map of the world itself.
This article was originally published din 2010 and was reedited to include more information.
