Commercial General Maps in the Late Qing Dynasty: the Case of Two Maps in the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Collection

Abstract For many years, official and private maps of China have received a great deal of attention from scholars, leaving discussions on commercial maps largely unexplored. This paper focuses on two maps from the (map) collection of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science ( MPIWG ) that exemplify the typology of commercial general maps prevalent since the late Ming dynasty: their production methods, styles, and contents have different genealogies and variations compared to those used in official and private maps. The audience for commercial maps consisted mainly of ordinary travellers and merchants, reflecting the disparities between geographical knowledge available to ordinary people and that shown on official or private maps. Commercial maps help us fully understand that, although Western cartography and geographical knowledge had been accepted and integrated into official and private maps, the knowledge held by the wider public continued to be based on the Chinese traditional knowledge until the late Qing dynasty. In other words, these maps unveil a significant insight into the socially stratified nature of geographical knowledge during the Ming and Qing eras.