The Mapping of Tibet: A Journey through Different Mapping Practices

The Mapping of Tibet: A Journey through Different Mapping Practices BY DIANA LANGE · 26/11/2024 For many years I have undertaken extensive research on the maps in the British Library’s Wise Collection – showing the route between Lhasa in Central Tibet and Ladakh in the Western Himalayas over a length of more than ten metres (Lange 2020). They were made in the late 1850s by a Tibetan lama who was commissioned by a British official to draw up the panorama of a region which was practically inaccessible to Europeans at the time. Using the Wise Collection, I documented how and with what intention knowledge of Tibetan landscapes was represented on maps in the mid-19th century. During this research I came into contact with all kinds of maps of Tibet, made from different perspectives, from different materials and by different actors, in particular by Tibetans, Chinese and Europeans.1 I became more and more interested in how different cultural and cartographical frames have influenced the contents and shape of geographical maps of Tibet. Thus, in my current research project on “Maps as Knowledge Resources and Mapmaking as Process: The Case of the Mapping of Tibet”2, I build up and expand my previous research on the Wise Collection. My aim is to gain a more precise understanding of the processes of mapmaking and the materiality of maps in general, using the example of the mapping of Tibet. Fig. 1: Map from the Wise Collection, showing the town of Shigatse in Central Tibet with Tashilhunpo Monastery in the centre. Numerous other monasteries are depicted, as well as settlements and rivers. Travel routes are indicated in grey colour. British Library, Wise Collection, BL Add. Or. 3016, f. 2. Link ↗ A look at the maps of this area reveals how much mapping processes can vary and how different the mapmakers’ perspectives can be. Particularly since the 18th century, Tibetan landscapes have been mapped by different actors in different so-called “cartographic languages”, resulting in different visual representations of the area. By “cartographic languages” I mean the whole linguistic and graphic repertoire, including the cartographic frame of the maps. If we take a first and quick look at the different maps made by the actors mentioned above, we can state that – in very simplified terms – maps made by Europeans in the “scientific way” of mapping look very abstract. In contrast – and also in very simplified terms – Chinese maps look more pictorial. In China two major cartographic traditions have been identified: descriptive and analytical (or mathematical).3 The descriptive type of maps is based primarily on cultural data: they refer to certain spatial ideas or viewpoints, political, religious and aesthetic interests more than to geographical facts. The analytical type is based on relatively precise mathematical measurements undertaken during surveys. Both types of map look more pictorial than European maps but also include abstract elements. Maps made by the Tibetans in the indigenous Tibetan way of mapping look – again in very simplified terms – like living landscapes. The Chinese Perspective: Mapping Tibet as Part of the Qing Empire (1644– 1911) Tibet has been extensively mapped by the Chinese who began to document the region on a large scale in the 18th century. Among the earliest maps are those published in 1789 by Song Yun (松筠) – a former Qing imperial official in Tibet – in the Xizhao tulue (⻄招圖略, “A Description of Tibet Accompanied by Maps”). Based on his inspection tours in the late 18th century, Song Yun prepared detailed maps that were later reproduced and published in other works such as the late 18th century Weizang tuzhi ( 衛 藏 圖 識 , “A Topographical Description of Central Tibet”) and the 19th century Xizang tukao (⻄藏圖考, “Atlas of Tibet”). All maps in these works were based on land surveys made by high intellectuals from the central government in the descriptive Chinese cartographic tradition, but without the application of the so-called Chinese grid system. This means that these maps were not drawn according to scale based on a square or the survey grid. However, the mapmakers did not take into account the curvature of the earth. The first maps of parts of Tibet based on the latitude and longitude projection were produced in the 18th century in connection with the production of the “court atlases” in Beijing – one of the most comprehensive mapping projects in Chinese history, conducted on behalf of the Kangxi Emperor and involving Qing officials and a small number of European missionaries (Cams 2017). In 1717 a first woodblock print atlas was presented, followed by other editions. It became known as the Kangxi Atlas. The first maps of parts of Tibet appeared in the 1721 atlas. Fig. 2: Map of the area around Lhasa, reproduced from the 1721 woodcut edition of the Kangxi Atlas. Walter Fuchs (ed.): Der Jesuiten-Atlas der Kanghsi-Zeit. China und die Aussenländer, Beijing 1941, p. 13. Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division. Link ↗ What unites all these maps is the purpose for which they were created: to map Tibet as precisely as possible as part of the Qing Empire, and in particular to map the southern borders with a view to China’s own defence policy. During the first century and a half, the Qing dynasty was remarkably successful in its effort to build and expand its empire – it doubled the amount of territory it controlled (Hostetler 2001: 33–35). As the historian Laura Hostetler has noted, “the Kangxi emperor’s desire for ‘a precise map which would unite all parts of his empire in one glance’ corresponded roughly with Peter the Great’s mapping of Russia, French cartographic projects at home and in the New World, and early British colonial exploits in India” (Hostetler 2001: 4). The “court atlases” soon found their way to Europe. From a European perspective, the Kangxi Atlas formed the basis for building a more accurate understanding of China. Based on these atlases the French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville (1697–1782) produced his maps of China and Central Asia in his Nouvel Atlas de la Chine, de la Tartarie chinoise, et du Thibet (1737). But also later maps of parts of Tibet made by Europeans were based on Chinese atlases, such as a map in the Perthes Collection, entitled NordTibet und Lob-Nur-Gebiet nach der Darstellung der allgemeinen Karte des Chinesischen Reichs (Ta Thsing i thung yü thu), erschienen zu Wu-tshang-fu im Jahr 1863.4 The map was compiled and published in 1893 by Georg Wegener (1863– 1939) and Karl Himly (1854–1933); it was based on a map in the Da Qing yitong yutu (⼤清⼀統與圖, “Comprehensive geographic map of the Great Qing”). Fig. 3: Map from d’Anville’s atlas showing parts of Western Tibet and Ladakh in today’s north-western India. Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville: Nouvel Atlas de la Chine, de la Tartarie chinoise, et du Thibet, La Haye 1737. Gotha Research Library, Perthes Collection. Link ↗ The European Perspective: Filling White Spots on European Maps In contrast to the Chinese, the Europeans were more interested in mapping Tibet to documenting one of the last white areas on their maps – and possibly making it controllable. First European more or less detailed maps of Tibet appeared in the 18th century, but first comprehensive maps of Tibet drawn by Europeans have only been made in the 1860s and 1870s. Because of Tibet’s strategic location in Central Asia as a scene of the Great Game between the British and Russian empires, and increasing economic interests and mercantile investments, Europeans edged closer to Tibet during the 19th century. Acquiring systematic knowledge of Tibetan landscapes and societies became an important goal for both empires. In this context the British approached Tibet from the south and the Russians from the north. Although the British were experienced in surveying mountainous regions, entering Tibet was no easy undertaking for them, mainly because Tibet was difficult for Europeans to reach until the early 20th century. Not only were the Chinese present in the area, but the Tibetans themselves – suspicious of Europeans – persistently defended their borders (Lange 2020: 39). Hence British knowledge of Tibet was not always the result of direct observation of nature and society, but often depended on indigenous people. As a result, the region was occasionally culturally represented and visualised by locals, as in the case of the Wise Collection. The maps in this collection were made in the late 1850s, at a time when the mapping of British India was largely complete, but before Indian pundits, the “spies” of the British Empire, first explored Tibet. It was Thomas George Montgomerie (1830–1878), British surveyor and participant in the Great Trigonometric Survey of India, who developed in 1862 the idea of training “natives of Hindostan” as “trans-Himalayan explorers” to make route surveys in Central Asia (Waller 2004: 26–29). These pundits did not produce maps; rather, they made accurate route surveys. Based on this information, the British made astonishingly accurate maps of the area, such as the map prepared by the Trigonometrical Branch of the Survey of India, captioned Parts of Tibet, Sikhim and Bhután. Sheet No. 6 of North Eastern Frontier (1885). “North Eastern Frontier” refers to the perspective from British India. In contrast, maps made by Russian expeditions to Central Asia, including parts of Tibet, focussed on mapping the areas south of the Russian Empire, such as the expedition from 1889 to 1891. A map made by Karol Bohdanowicz (1864–1947) showing one of the march routes of this expedition is kept in the Perthes Collection. Fig. 4: “Parts of Tibet, Sikhim and Bhutan; sheet no. 6 of North Eastern Frontier”. Sarat Chandra Das: Narrative of a Journey to Lhasa in 1881–82, Calcutta 1885. Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Link ↗ Fig. 5: Map made by Bohdanowicz showing the area east and south-east of Khotan in today’s Xinjiang Province of China. Gotha Research Library, Perthes Collection. Link ↗ The Legacy of Tibetans Mapmaking In contrast to European and Chinese actors, whose goal was to map the region as comprehensively as possible in a context of political power, the Tibetans themselves did not develop a comparable impulse to map the entire region. However, despite its small population, Tibet has given rise to a remarkably rich and varied cartographic tradition. A first general overview of the cartography of Tibet has been provided by Joseph Schwartzberg in his Maps of Greater Tibet in the History of Cartography series in 1994. He suggests that the roots of cartography in Tibet extend far back in time and probably first took hold outside the region itself; and that it seems clear that Tibetan cartography owes much to foreign cultural influences, in particular from India and China. The extant and accessible portable Tibetan maps that were produced before the mid-20th century are scattered across different institutions around the world, in museums, libraries, archives and private collections. There are only very few collections with larger holdings such as the maps in the Wise Collection at the British Library. Another important collection and probably the largest corpus of Tibetan geographic regional maps outside of Tibet is part of the Heinrich Harrer Collection in the Ethnographic Museum of the University of Zurich (Lange and Lhendup 2024). Fig. 6: Tibetan map from the Harrer Collection, “lha mdun khul gyi sa khra” (Map of Lhadun district). Zentralbibliothek Zürich, MK 3063. Link ↗ Schwartzberg distinguished between cosmographic and geographic Tibetan maps although the number of known geographic maps from Tibet appears small in comparison with the cosmographic materials (Schwartzberg 1994: 612, 638). As to the content of Tibetan geographic maps, there are different genres such as regional maps, town maps, monastery maps, route maps and maps of pilgrimage sites. The rules governing the composition of such maps appear to be far from uniform. No general rules existed with respect to the orientation of maps, and the use of varying “scales” for different map elements has been common. It is common for many Tibetan mapmakers to orient features so that they point away from the map reader – in most cases rivers form the axis in the map centre. In such cases the traveller’s view is depicted as he walks along a river bank – mountain peaks, trees, houses and other features, including inscriptions, typically point away from the valley bottom, in opposite directions on its two flanks. Tibetan mapmakers often adopted an oblique perspective, as if from a perch in space. This practice was possibly influenced by the physical environment of Tibetan landscapes. Over most of Tibet, there are high vantage points from which largely barren expanses of land stretch before the observer like living maps (Schwartzberg 1994: 671–673). The use of such an oblique perspective for the production of maps brings us to the most common Tibetan term for “map”: sa khra, which translates as “earth-eagle” or, in other words, a “bird’s(-eye) view of the earth”. This term clearly refers to the mapmaker’s spatial perception of the area represented on the map. Maps of Tibet Seen through Different Lenses The case of the mapping of Tibet is of special interest in the context of mapmaking, as it involves a multi-directional interaction between Tibet, China and Europe. There are also maps that are not easily categorised or assigned to a specific cartographic language or type: maps whose production involved actors and ideas from different cultural and cartographical backgrounds, bilingual maps and maps translated into other languages. For example, there are maps of Tibet made by Europeans which, although they include longitudes and latitudes, look rather pictorial and descriptive, such as a map made of the area around lake Kokonor in north-eastern Tibet in today’s Qinghai province in China (Szcześniak 1959). This map was made in 1715 by the Franciscan missionary Giovanni Battista Maoletti de Serravalle (1669–1725), who worked in the area depicted on the map for about 15 years. The map was not intended as a scientific work; it was rather made as a sketch map to illustrate a mission report and to show the size and position of mission stations. It includes numerous Chinese features such as mountains sketched in Chinese style, the Great Wall represented by battlements and gates, and abstract signs – large and small squares – indicating cities and towns. Maoletti’s map belongs to the so-called hybrid maps: a map that shows traces of different cartographic languages, a map that cannot be assigned to a single cartographic category or map type (see DorofeevaLichtmann 2024: 2). I could only briefly show that the various cultural and cartographic inventions developed by the Europeans, Chinese and Tibetans resulted in maps that are very different in terms of their content and appearance. A diversity of cartographic traditions and depictions is of course not unique to Tibet. For instance, the history of European cartography distinguishes between mappaemundi relying on the Biblical conceptions of terrestrial space and two incompatible traditions of “scientific cartography” – maps rooted in Ptolemaic geography and early modern nautical charts (Gaspar Alves and Leitão 2019). The interesting difference between Chinese and Tibetan cartography on the one hand and European cartography on the other hand is that, while mappaemundi and the early modern charts gradually left the cartographic scene, pre-modern types of Chinese and Tibetan maps continued to be produced and reproduced well up to the 20th century. Cartographic languages can also change, which can be clearly seen in the external appearance of more modern Tibetan maps – maps that were created in the first half of the 20th century based on European maps depicting Tibet as a whole region. This was done with the clear intention of representing Tibet as an independent nation after the region declared its independence in 1913 following the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Such maps did not exist before; they only emerged in the context of the nation-building process in the early 20th century. References and Further Reading Cams, Mario: Companions in Geography. East-West Collaboration in the Mapping of Qing China (c.1685–1735), Leiden 2017. Das, Sarat Chandra: Narrative of a Journey to Lhasa in 1881–82, Calcutta 1885. Dorofeeva-Lichtmann, Vera: Reformatting a Traditional Image of the Qing Imperial Realm According to Modern Western Cartography. The Map of the “Great Qing Everlastingly Unified” ⼤清萬年⼀統經緯輿圖 by Li Mingche 李明徹 (1751–1832), in: Crossroads 24 (2024), pp.1–56. Fuchs, Walter: Der Jesuiten-Atlas der Kanghsi-Zeit. Seine Entstehungsgeschichte nebst Namensindices für die Karten der Mandjurei, Mongolei, Ostturkestan und Tibet mit Wiedergabe der Karten in Originalgröße, Beijing 1943. Gaspar Alves, Joaquim, Henrique Leitão: Early Modern Nautical Charts and Maps. Working through Different Cartographic Paradigms, in: Journal of Early Modern History 23.1 (2019), pp. 1–28. Hostetler, Laura: Qing Colonial Enterprise. Ethnography and Cartography in Early Modern China, Chicago/London 2001. Hsu, Mei-Ling: The Han Maps and Early Chinese Cartography, in: Annals of the Association of American Geographers 68.1 (1978), pp. 45–60. Lange, Diana, Yeshi Lhendup: Exploring the Legacy of Tibetan Mapmaking. Manuscript Maps from the Harrer Collection at the Ethnographic Museum, University of Zurich, in: manuscript cultures 24.1 (2024), pp. 1– 61, https://doi.org/10.15460/mc.2024.24.1.1. Lange, Diana: An Atlas of the Himalayas by a 19th-century Tibetan Lama. A Journey of Discovery, Leiden 2020. Needham, Joseph: Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, Cambridge 1959. Schwartzberg, Joseph: Maps of Greater Tibet, in: J.B. Harley, David Woodward (eds.): The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, Chicago 1994, pp. 607–685. Szcześniak, Bolesław: The Description and Map of Kansu by Giovanni Battista Maoletti De Serravalle, in: Monumenta Serica 18.1 (1959), pp. 294– 313, https://doi.org/10.1080/02549948.1959.11730989. Waller, Derek: The Pundits. British Exploration of Tibet and Central Asia, Lexington 2004. Yee, Cordell D.K.: Reinterpreting Traditional Chinese Geographical Maps, in: J.B. Harley, David Woodward (eds.): The History of Cartography, vol. 2, book 2: Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, Chicago 1994, pp. 35–70. 1. Over the last ten years I developed a comprehensive database of maps of Tibet made before 1950, maps from different institutions, museums, archives and libraries worldwide. The majority of the surviving and accessible maps were produced between the 18th and early 20th centuries. [↩] 2. The project is affiliated with the Cluster of Excellence Understanding Written Artefacts at the CSMC (Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, University of Hamburg). Applying methods from the material sciences and with art- and culturalhistorical as well as cartographical approaches, the proposed research will provide a comprehensive historical and analytical account of maps of Tibet, their production and their significance. The main outcome of my research project is a monograph entitled Tibet in 108 Maps: A Journey through Practices (forthcoming, will be published with Brill). [↩] Different Mapping 3. Major figures in this context are the American geographer Hsu Mei-Ling and historian of Chinese cartography Cordell Yee. Hsu distinguished these two traditions as either analytical or descriptive, Yee as mathematical and descriptive (see Hsu 1978 and Yee 1994). [↩] 4. “Northern Tibet and Lob-Nur area according to the general map of the Chinese Empire (Ta-Thsing i Tung yü thu), published in Wu-tshang-fu in 1863”. [↩] OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows: Diana Lange (November 26, 2024). The Mapping of Tibet: A Journey through Different Mapping Practices. Mapping Africa and Asia. Retrieved November 26, 2024 from https://doi.org/10.58079/12rkx §