RCCHC "China and the World: Historical Interactions" Talk Series #12 - The Encounter between 'Nine Zhou' and 'Asia': Rethinking the Cartographic Dialogues of Matteo Ricci and Martino Martini

Matteo Ricci translated the notion of Orbis Terrarum into Chinese. In so doing, this notion, depicted by Ortelius and Mercator in European maps, presented itself in a series of the earliest world maps in China, notably the Kun Yu Wan Guo Quan Tu. Martino Martini, on the other hand, employed European cartographic languages to translate the geographic imagination in East Asia, represented by the Guang Yu Tu. In so doing he provided the most authoritative images of East Asia in European atlases in the 17th and 18th centuries. The contribution of these two figures was not merely to offer new geographic knowledge to their respective readers, but to proactively transformed basic concepts in a foreign context and created a positive understanding of “the other” in a new cultural context. Ricci integrated the concepts of “Asia” and “Nine Zhou,” which led to the invention of the word “ya zhou” (Asian Continent) among Chinese speakers. Martini interpreted China as an “empire,” which introduced the basic affirmation of the nature of ancient China in the mainstream European atlases. The Sino-West cartographic dialogue initiated by them suggested the importance of mutual understanding, tolerance, and compromise, as opposed to a total replacement of one by the other.