《坤舆全图》Kunyu quantu

Title: 《坤舆全图》Kunyu quantu
Date Created: 1674
Creator: Joan Blaeu; Arthur W. Hummel; Ferdinand Verbiest
Identifier: G3200 1674 .V4; gm71002352
Original Location: Beijing, China
Current Location: Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division, Washington, D.C.
Description: Presented to the Kangxi Emperor in 1674, Flemish Jesuit Ferdinand Verbiest’s Kunyu Quantu (A Complete Map of the World) is a masterpiece of early modern global synthesis. Far from a mere geographical tool, this eight-panel woodblock map functioned as a dynamic crossroads where European natural philosophy met Chinese aesthetic traditions.

The map exemplifies the transnational circulation of knowledge. Verbiest’s cartography drew from Joan Blaeu’s world maps, reflecting contemporary European misconceptions such as California depicted as an island. More strikingly, the map serves as a “paper menagerie”: its depictions of exotic land and sea creatures from the Antipodes are direct descendants of Conrad Gessner’s Historia Animalium and Olaus Magnus’s marine imagery. Here, these creatures — from the pouch-bearing opossum to the enigmatic siren — illustrate how natural history imagery adapted across cultural boundaries.

Artistically, the Kunyu Quantu is a harmonious Sino-Western hybrid. While the animals exhibit the three-dimensional shading and anatomical precision of European realism, the physical landscape remains deeply rooted in Chinese sensibilities. The turbulent oceans and jagged peaks employ traditional “scattered perspective” (sǎn diǎn tòu shì) and ink-wash textures, framing the global terrain within the visual language of classical Chinese landscape painting.

Surviving maps reveal a complex circulation of material knowledge that extend far beyond the 17th-century Forbidden City. The 1856 Guangdong reissue and the 1860 Korean edition demonstrated Kunyu Quantu’s evolving functions, contexts and cultural value. The biography of individual copies followed separate journeys westward: one passed through the hands of scholars such as the eighteenth-century classicist Theophilus Siegfried Bayer and is now preserved in the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow; another was acquired in China in the 1920s by American missionary John Hummel and entered the Library of Congress.
Credit: Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.
Link: Online Collection: Kunyu Quantu in Library of Congress; Research Insight: The Global Journey and Provenance of Kunyu Quantu; Online Collection: Kunyu Quantu at The Hunterian Museum, University of Glasgow; Surviving Woodblocks: Material Evidence of the 1860 Korean Edition
Contributor: Ru Wang, PhD Candidate, Department of History, Sun Yat-sen University