首頁 > 布告欄 > 學術活動
日期: 2019/10/21
時間: 15:00~17:00
地點: 檔案館第二會議室
主講人:Prof. Timothy Brook(卜正民教授)(Republic of China Chair, Department of History, University of British Columbia)
主辦單位: 近史所
本場次演講開放自由參加,毋需報名。 The world is too impossibly vast for us to see or imagine without already having an image in mind. At almost every time or place in world history, that image has relied on repetition more than innovation. The great exception was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the global expansion of maritime travel obliged both Europeans and Chinese to revise their images of the world. These heavily illustrated lectures pivot on one particular map printed in Nanjing in 1644 to explore this history from both ends, looking first at the impact of Matteo Ricci’s mappa mundi of 1602 on Nanjing publishers, and then at the history of Chinese maps that reached Europe and shaped how Europeans understood the far end of Eurasia. Together, the lectures tell a story not of the West teaching the East, but of East and West adapting images from the other in a genuinely reciprocal process of assembling the knowledge needed to complete the map of the world. Lecture 1. Taipei, 1644: Drawing the World from China Chinese mapmakers before 1644 published world maps, but not maps depicting the entire globe. That year, Cao Junyi adapted Ricci’s map to draw the world in a shape never before seen. This map, of which there is a copy here in the National Library, is known to historians. Less known is the process that led to its creation; still less recognized is the effect that Cao’s design had in Japan and Europe into the nineteenth century. Publishers gave these new-style world maps their own label: “complete maps,” sometimes “complete maps of the ten thousand countries” (wanguo quantu) and sometimes “complete maps of all under Heaven” (tianxia quantu). This new genre was created in response to European cartography, but it fashioned its own shapes and meanings through an intercultural process that cannot be reduced to mere imitation. “Complete maps” were also the product of a particular place, Nanjing: a city with a vibrant publishing culture, an understated exposure to the outside world, and a powerful allegiance to the dynasty that was destroyed the year Cao published his map.