Book Chapter

Introduction

Short, John Rennie

2012

Overview

This introductory chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore one aspect of material culture that expresses national identity—the map—and considers how Korea was represented in and through maps over the six hundred years from the end of the fourteenth century to the present day. The central proposition of this book is that the cartographic representation of Korea is part of the general story of production of global space, and in this particular case the result of a series of wider cartographic encounters between Asia and Europe in which the foreign and the indigenous mapmaking traditions are continually interacting to produce new hybrid forms. The chapter then describes two world maps produced at approximately the same time in different parts of the world, at the dawn of the early modern period. The first is one of the oldest Korean maps in existence, commonly referred to as Gangnido. The second is a European map made at about the same time—the Ulm map—which shows the world as known to the ancient Greeks and to Europeans on the eve of the great exploration of the New World, comprising Europe, Asia, and Africa.

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Subject: Asian History / cartography / Colonialism and Imperialism / European maps / Gangnido / Historical Geography / Korea / Korean maps / mapping / Ulm map
• ISBN: 0226753646, 9780226753645