Country Driving [51]
There are a number of reasons why cartography developed in this manner, and the most important factor was a lack of government interest in exploration and trade. Chinese emperors rarely encouraged expeditions, and officials traditionally disdained the merchant class. In contrast, the greatest advances in European and Arabic cartography were tied to trade. During the thirteenth century AD, the introduction of the compass—originally a Chinese invention—allowed merchants to create meticulously detailed charts of the Mediterranean. Two hundred years later, as the Portuguese tried to open southern trade routes, they mapped the coast of Africa with remarkable accuracy. This project depended on both government and private merchants—Portuguese princes coordinated the surveying efforts of traders, until finally they created a diagram of the African coastline.
But there weren’t any equivalent breakthroughs in Chinese cartography, which developed out of very different motivations. In ancient China, maps served military needs, and the army had little incentive to create detailed diagrams of the interior and the coastline. Wars tended to be fought in the north and the west, in the regions of the Great Wall, where geography is vast and often featureless. For an army in such a landscape, specific points matter more than context, and Chinese maps usually focused on key passes or important forts. In the end, any map describes not only a region but also the key interests of the mapmakers themselves. During the same century that the Portuguese were trying to access the gold trade of East Africa, the Ming dynasty was protecting itself against northern nomads, and these very different goals created very different schematic views of the world.
In China, where maps developed primarily as tools of the government and military, there isn’t a tradition of emphasizing their use by private individuals. Atlases play little role in Chinese education: open an elementary school geography textbook and you see mostly words. Students might be encouraged to write about their environment, but they never sketch it. Like many practical skills of the new economy, map reading hasn’t yet become part of the curriculum, and people can spend years in school without learning how to handle an atlas. Often the first time they wrestle with one is when they start to drive. Even if a Chinese person is interested in highly detailed maps, he has trouble finding them, because the government is wary about such diagrams. There’s still a tendency to associate any mapmaking with military interests, especially in the far west, where it’s impossible to find good atlases of places such as Tibet and Xinjiang. Even in nonsensitive parts of China, topographic maps are classified and unavailable on the market. For my driving trip, I didn’t bother to bring a GPS device. It would have been all but worthless without good maps, but my main concern was that such equipment might make me look like a foreigner engaged in surveying the remote west.
And so I relied on the Sinomaps, which were still the best thing available on the market. The state-owned company was founded in 1954, not long after the Communists came to power, and for decades Sinomaps continued to follow the traditional goal of serving the government and military. Their headquarters are located in downtown Beijing, near Tiananmen Square, and once I stopped by for a visit. The place had the feel of an old-school danwei, or work unit: badly lit hallways, big meeting rooms, lots of people wandering around without much obvious purpose. They currently had 480 employees, which must have been enough, because workers played Ping-Pong in the hallway throughout my meeting with the deputy