China, olim Sinarum
Cartographer:
Ortelius, Abraham
Date of Creation:
1584
China, Luis Jorgé de Barbuda /Abraham Ortelius, 1584 (West is at the top)
Chinae, olim Sinarum regionis, nova descriptio. auctore Ludovico Georgio…
In: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, Antwerp, 1584. Copperplate engraving.
Little is known about Luis Jorgé de Barbuda, also know as Ludovicus Georgius, a Portuguese in the service of Philip II of Spain. As can be seen in the title of the map, Ortelius credits him with the original manuscript from which this engraved map was made.
Barbuda divides China into six maritime and nine inland provinces, information garnered from Bernardino de Escalante’s Discurso de la navegación… (1577), which in turn borrowed from João de Barros’ Décadas da Ásia, the first volume of which dates from 1552. But both Escalante and Barros were vague in their placement of the interior regions, and so the accuracy of the fifteen provinces declines inland. While Barbuda locates the maritime provinces fairly accurately, Yunnan incorrectly appears to the north of Szechwan.
Ortelius records the Great Wall and identifies it as “a Wall of four hundred leagues, between the banks of the hills, built by the king of China against the breaking in of Tartars on this side.” It is shown between two long mountain spines, generally conforming to the contour of the southern one.
A legend by the large inland lake (labeled simply Lacus) relates that it overflowed in 1557 and inundated seven cities of the Shansi province. Barbuda probably misunderstood an inscription on a 1561 map by the Portuguese mapmaker Bartolomeu Vehlo, which probably related to the nearby Yellow River. In the ocean, Taiwan (Ins Fermosa) now appears prominently,
Above the map’s title, we move from Portuguese data to Spanish data, with the inclusion of the southern Philippine islands, but not yet Luzon, the island on which Manila lies. They are placed in the Sinus Magnus (great gulf), a carry-over from Ptolemy’s eastern Indian Ocean. The large diagonal feature above Sinus Magnus is the Philippine island of Palawan, unnamed on this early strike of the plate, but to which the engraver soon added the label Las Philippinas. West of Palawan (above) lie the Paracels (Pracel ins), small islands that dot the region and that were both fertile fishing grounds and a danger to navigation, and in our day contested for their oil and gas reserves.
Palanquins (land ships) and Tartar yurts (moveable tents) are shown beyond the Wall, the former placed there simply as a matter of available space. More non-geographic information comes on the back to the map, where Ortelius reproduces a few of the Chinese characters brought back by Escalante.
It is interesting to note that, on the back of the map, Ortelius also acknowledges that the Chinese had developed “the use and art of printing of books, long before it was known to us here in Europe, the West part of the world.”