Mapping China and Managing the World: Culture, Cartography and Cosmology in Late Imperial Times

From the founding of the Qin dynasty in 221 BCE to the present, the Chinese have been preoccupied with the notion of ordering their world. Efforts to create and maintain order are expressed not only in China’s bureaucratic institutions and methods of social and economic organization but also in Chinese philosophy, religious and secular ritual, and comprehensive systems of classifying all natural and supernatural phenomena.

Mapping China and Managing the World focuses on Chinese construction...