The role of classical Chinese as a written language shared by scholars throughout East Asia meant that books were shared as well. Sometimes they were bestowed as official gifts, sometimes purchased by visiting diplomats, but on a larger scale – albeit one that is difficult to measure – they moved through commercial trade. Such trade sometimes took place directly over the ocean between the mainland and Japan, and sometimes via the Korean peninsula. Ōba Osamu has emphasized the interconnectedness of East Asia in his studies of the ‘Book Road,’ an intellectual reconfiguration of the ‘Silk Road’ that emphasizes not the transfer of wealth, but of knowledge between the Asian mainland and Japan. This transfer of the written word, which Ōba shows was already in full swing by the Tang period (618-907 CE), suggests that when appraising intellectual events in one part of East Asia we should consider influences that affected the region as a whole. Developments in cartography are no exception.

This chapter examines the significance of Ming publishing to cartography in Chosŏn Korea. By this time, Chinese maps had been imported into Korea for centuries through both official and private channels. Such maps even inspired poetry, as Korean readers contemplated their place in a Sinocentric worldview. The Koryo poet Yi Kyubo (1168-1241) responded to a Song map by comparing his peninsula’s small size on the map with its cultural preeminence: