[KS] Old Korean maps of Europe?

[gkl1 at columbia.edu]

   My monograph "Cartography in Korea" discusses the famous Kangnido
map of 1402, a Buddhist world map of the 12th century, an 18th
century Korean globe showing the entire world including Antarctica,
and the very popular Ch'Onhado of the 17th-19th centuries, which I
believe was a kind of folk literati spinoff of the Kangnido.
There's nothing in any of these maps which has resonance with the
concept "medieval," which pretty much is valent only in the
historiography of Western civilization.
   The Kangnido (the popular though abbreviated title) was a genuine
world map which showed Korea and China as the core, with Japan
tossed (literally) into the ocean on the east, and with  India,
Africa, the Arabian peninsula, the Mediterranean and Black Sea
areas, and a vague outline of the European peninsula added on the
western side. The latter components came from a 14th century
Chinese map based on an Islamic original. There are several Korean
copies of the 15th and 16th centuries, the oldest of which dates
from around 1471; unfortunately, all of them were stolen during the
Imjin wars and are now owned by Japanese institutions. The maps is
huge-- 164x172cm.

   See Gari Ledyard, "Cartography in Korea," in J.B. Harley and
David Woodward, eds., <The History of Cartography>, vol 2, part 2
<Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies>
(Univ Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 235-345, of which the section on
world maps, pp. 243-267 (several illustrations, including a nice
color photo of the Kangnido on the cover jacket, which probably
will be missing from library copies; but there are black-and-white
versions with the article and in the following:

  I also wrote a condensed version of my discussion ("The Kangnido,
a Korean World Map") in <Circa 1492: Art in the Age of
Exploration>. This was the catalogue (1992) for the National
Gallery of Art show "Circa 1492," on the 500th anniversary of the 
Columbus voyage, which so far is the only occasion on which the
Kangnido has left Japan (it's held by Ry^ukoku Daigaku in Ky^oto).

   In the Kyujanggak Library of Seoul National University there is
also a highly researched and beautifully executed modern Korean
hand copy, done during the 1980s.

Gari Ledyard

Quoting DeberniereTorrey <djtorrey at yahoo.com>:

> Dear List Members,
>
> On behalf of a colleague, I'm inquiring to see if
> anyone knows of any medieval Korean map that includes
> Europe or any other part of the western world?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Deberniere Torrey
>
> Dept. of Comparative Literature
> Penn State University
>
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