For centuries, travelers have made Central Asia known to the wider world through their writings. In this volume, scholars employ these little-known texts in a wide range of Asian and European languages to trace how Central Asia was gradually absorbed into global affairs. The representations of the region brought home to China and Japan, India and Persia, Russia and Great Britain, provide valuable evidence that helps map earlier periods of globalization and cultural interaction.

For centuries, travelers have made Central Asia known to the wider world through their writings. In this volume, scholars employ these little-known texts in a wide range of Asian and European languages to trace how Central Asia was gradually absorbed into global affairs. The representations of the region brought home to China and Japan, India and Persia, Russia and Great Britain, provide valuable evidence that helps map earlier periods of globalization and cultural interaction.

The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial state's persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former "outer zones" in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of "all-under-heaven" to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the twentieth century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived, promises to provide insight into the contested development of the geographical entity which we, today, call 'China.'

Laura Hostetler here shows how Qing China (1636-1911) used cartography and ethnography to pursue its imperial ambitions. She argues that far from being on the periphery of developments in the early modern period, Qing China both participated in and helped shape the new emphasis on empirical scientific knowledge that was simultaneously transforming Europe - and its colonial empires - at the time. Although mapping in China is almost as old as Chinese civilization itself, the Qing insistence on accurate scale maps of their territory was a new response to the difficulties of administering a vast and growing empire. Likewise, direct observation became increasingly important to Qing ethnographic writings, such as the illustrated manuscripts known as "Miao albums" (from which twenty color paintings are reproduced in this book). These were intended to educate Qing officials about various non-Han peoples so they could govern these groups more effectively. Hostetler's groundbreaking study provides a wealth of insights to anyone interested in the significance of cartography, the growth of empire, or this exciting period of Chinese history.

How did Asia come to be represented on European World maps? When and how did Asian Countries adopt a continental system for understanding the world? How did countries with disparate mapping traditions come to share a basic understanding and vision of the globe? This series of essays organized into sections on Jesuit Circuits of Communication and Publication; Jesuit World Maps in Chinese; Reverberations of Matteo Ricci's Maps in East Asia; and Reflections on the Curation of Cartographic Knowledge, go a long way toward answering these questions about the shaping of our modern understandings of the world.

Commissioned by the Qianlong emperor in 1751, the Qing Imperial Illustrations of Tributary Peoples (Huang Qing zhigong tu ), is a captivating work of art and an ideological statement of universal rule best understood as a cultural cartography of empire. This translation of the ethnographic texts accompanied by a full-color reproduction of Xie Sui's ( ) hand-painted scroll helps us to understand the conceptualization of imperial tributary relationships the work embodies as rooted in both dynastic history and the specifics of Qing rule.

The authors in this volume believe that long-term, profound, and sometimes tumultuous changes in the last five hundred years of the history of China have been no less geographical than social, political, or economic. From the dialectics of local-empire relations to the imperial state's persistent array of projects for absorbing and transforming ethnic regions on the margins of empire; from the tripling of imperial territories in the Qing to the disputes over the identity of the former "outer zones" in the early Republican era; and from the universalistic imagination of "all-under-heaven" to the fraught processes of re-drawing a new set of nation-state boundaries in the twentieth century, the study of the dynamics of geography, broadly conceived, promises to provide insight into the contested development of the geographical entity which we, today, call 'China.'