Cheonha do 天下圖 and the Reception of Renaissance Geography in Late Joseon Korea
Presented by Dr. Jeanhyoung Soh
Cheonha do 天下圖 (Map of All Under Heaven), which was circulated widely in Korea from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, is famous for the mixture reflecting the new geographic information from Europe and the traditional geographic thought. In Cheonha do, the Earth is depicted as round, and the continents and islands are filled with strange countries of the Shanhai jing. It started appearing after the circulation and reproduction of the Kunyu wanguo quantu 坤輿萬國全圖, the “Wanguo quantu” 萬國全圖 (1623) included in the Zhifang waiji 職方外紀 (1623), and the Kunyu quantu 坤輿全圖 (1674) in Korea. The authors of Cheonha do, however, were generally anonymous, so it is not easy to interpret their intentions in making such maps. The maps themselves also give us little background information.
To understand this unique map, we need to reconstruct the context that relates the maps to a wide range of texts, from literati’s writings to novels. In reconstructing the intellectual context that gave rise to the Cheonha do, I show how the literati’s various writings articulate a desire to know about the countries outside of the Chinese tributary system, which did not always lead to openness. In this presentation, I explain how the hospitality and hostility to countries outside of the Chinese tributary system were based on the newly constructed fictional thinking -influenced by the incoming geographic knowledge- and then argue that Cheonha do reflects both the reception of new geographic knowledge as well as an extension of the idea of a central Chinese civilization (Zhonghua 中華).
“Cheonha chongdo” in Yeojido, manuscript, undated, collection of National Museum of Korea, 32cm x 17.8cm
About the speaker
Dr. Jeanhyoung Soh (Ph.D Seoul National University 2016) is a research fellow at the Institute of Humanities, Seoul University. Dr. Soh is a political and intellectual historian of Early Modern Korea, focusing on political language and rhetoric in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is working on Jesuit translations of Aristotles’ works, Renaissance maps, and catechisms that caused Korean political language and thought to change. She was a Henry Luce postdoctoral fellow at The Ricci Institute for Chinese-Western Cultural History, the University of San Francisco, in 2018. She recently organized the international workshop “Aristoteles Asianus: Aristotles' works, the Coimbra texts, and Jesuits’ Chinese translations in the seventeenth century.”
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