Before Europe “Discovered” the World

The Kangnido Map and the Historical Privileges of Discovery

By Maia

In 1402, Korean officials undertook to assemble a map of the world. They had Chinese maps before them, knowledge of their own country to contribute, and information about Japan to incorporate. The resulting work extended westward across Asia to Africa and Europe. China occupied an enormous expanse; Korea appeared with a prominence that no modern atlas would allow it; and Europe lay at the distant western margins of a geographical order whose principal concerns were elsewhere. The map’s makers had considerable difficulty fitting their materials together. They had no apparent difficulty accepting that the world extended far beyond the countries they knew best. Gari Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” pp. 244–248.

The map is generally known as the Kangnido. Its importance for world history lies partly in its date, but more substantially in the kind of intellectual activity that date makes visible. Here was an attempt to collect and reconcile geographical knowledge before the European voyages conventionally gathered under the heading “the Age of Discovery.” The world represented was incomplete, its proportions unequal, and its information uneven. Nevertheless, it was already the subject of inquiry, comparison, and description. A history that makes European oceanic expansion the moment when the world became known must explain whose knowledge it has chosen to count.

The objection is sometimes dismissed as a quarrel over terminology. Everyone, it may be said, understands that discovery refers to European discovery; no serious historian supposes that inhabited countries came into existence when Europeans reached them. But this defence concedes the central difficulty. A specifically European experience has supplied the name for an age of world history. The qualification remains implicit while the claim appears universal. Europe discovers; the other regions enter the account as the places discovered. The arrangement assigns intellectual initiative before the historical explanation has begun.

The Kangnido makes that arrangement difficult to sustain. Its challenge does not depend upon proving that Korean geographers knew every coast, or that they possessed information superior to every European mapmaker’s. It establishes a more consequential point: geographical knowledge had histories of production and circulation that cannot be organised around the moment of European arrival.

Some distinctions are necessary before the map can bear this argument. The work compiled in 1402 has not survived in its original form. It is known through later copies and revisions preserved in Japan, among them the celebrated example at Ryūkoku University. Features of a surviving copy cannot therefore be assigned indiscriminately to the original compilation. The map belongs to a documentary tradition whose successive forms require comparison. The survival of that tradition is evidence of continued use and reproduction, but it also imposes limits upon what can confidently be said about the first version. Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” pp. 245, 248–249.

The accompanying preface offers a firmer account of the undertaking. Kwon Kŭn described the comparison of two Chinese maps associated with Li Zemin and Qingjun, and the work of combining them under the direction of Korean officials. Deficiencies in the treatment of Korea required correction; material concerning Japan was added. The stated procedure was one of selection, collation, and supplementation. Its makers acknowledged that reducing the extent of the world to a manageable surface presented difficulties of precision. They understood themselves to be working upon an imperfect body of knowledge. Kwon Kŭn’s preface, translated in Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” pp. 244–245.

This account deserves more attention than the familiar spectacle of a recognisable Africa on an early Korean map. The compilation itself reveals an intellectual practice. Earlier authorities could be useful and deficient at the same time. Their materials could be compared, their omissions supplied, and their geographical coverage extended. The capacity to undertake such work did not require the compiler to have visited every place represented. It required access to information and the judgement to arrange it.

The distinction bears directly upon the prestige attached to discovery. Historical narratives readily identify the navigator who arrives at a coast; they have greater difficulty identifying the persons through whose successive observations that coast became known elsewhere. An arrival supplies a date, a name, and an episode. The circulation of knowledge may supply none of these with comparable clarity. Yet the latter is no less a historical achievement because it resists the conventions of heroic biography.

The western regions of the Kangnido furnish evidence of precisely such circulation. Scholarship has connected many of its geographical names with Arabic and Persian forms transmitted through Chinese cartography. Ledyard, reviewing the work of earlier specialists, treats Islamic geographical materials entering China under Mongol rule as central to understanding this part of the map, while acknowledging uncertainties in particular identifications. The Korean compilation thus preserves the effects of exchanges whose individual stages are only partly recoverable. Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” pp. 246–247.

The inference should remain proportionate to the evidence. A name with a recoverable linguistic history does not disclose every merchant, scholar, traveller, or official through whose hands it passed. Still less does it prove that Korean voyagers personally surveyed the territory concerned. It does establish that knowledge could travel farther than the individuals who finally recorded it. A geographical account produced in one setting could be translated, detached from its original circumstances, and incorporated into another.

This history also resists division into self-contained civilisations. The Kangnido was made in Korea, drew upon Chinese works, and incorporated western geographical information associated with Islamic traditions. To decide which civilisation should receive exclusive credit would misdescribe the achievement. Its importance lies in the combination. The categories by which modern histories distribute intellectual ownership are less stable than the movements of knowledge they attempt to contain.

Africa has understandably attracted particular interest. Its southward extension offers a striking contrast to what a reader might expect from an East Asian map compiled at the beginning of the fifteenth century. But resemblance to a modern outline cannot establish an otherwise undocumented circumnavigation, nor can it tell us how reliably a contemporary navigator could have used the representation. A mapped continental form, a practical sailing route, and a completed voyage are different kinds of evidence. The temptation to collapse them should be resisted even when the resulting claim would serve an attractive argument. Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” pp. 247–248.

Indeed, the case against a universal Age of Discovery becomes stronger when it relinquishes the search for an earlier victor. If the purpose is merely to show that an Asian navigator anticipated a European one, the competition retains its original rules. Historical importance continues to belong to the first outsider who can be credited with arrival. The peoples who inhabited the coast, named its features, and navigated its waters remain in the background. Transferring the honour of discovery leaves the hierarchy of knowledge substantially intact.

The more serious objection concerns the relationship between novelty and authority. A place may be new to a visitor without being newly known to humanity. Its appearance in a particular archive may mark an enlargement of that archive rather than the beginning of the place’s geographical history. Discovery is defensible when its subject and scope are specified. It becomes misleading when the limitations of one community’s knowledge are made to define the limits of knowledge itself.

The Kangnido’s distortions introduce a further complication. Its enlarged Korea and commanding China prevent it from serving as an innocent alternative to European geographical self-importance. Ledyard interprets their relative prominence in relation to a Korean understanding of the country’s position within an East Asian order. The map’s proportions, however, also arose from the practical difficulty of combining materials that differed in coverage and scale. Political interpretation is therefore necessary, but cannot explain every irregularity by itself. Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” pp. 247–248.

This tension is one of the map’s most instructive features. A representation may contain substantial information about distant regions while giving disproportionate attention to the society that produced it. Intellectual curiosity and political self-regard can coexist. The presence of a hierarchy does not make all its geographical content worthless; the presence of geographical knowledge does not make its hierarchy neutral.

Europe’s marginal position must be read in the same manner. Its smallness cannot establish its objective insignificance in every aspect of fifteenth-century life. It reveals its place within this particular arrangement of geographical attention. That is sufficient to disturb a narrative in which Europe’s eventual predominance appears already inscribed in the world’s earlier history. The Kangnido’s makers had no obligation to organise their map around developments that later historians would treat as decisive.

The same restraint should govern the map’s absence of the Americas. It cannot establish that all major regions were already joined in a single geographical system, and it offers no warrant for denying the enormous transformations associated with later transoceanic connections. The argument concerns the passage from these transformations to the claim that Europe discovered the world. That passage requires an assumption: that the world’s historical unity should be measured principally through Europe’s expanding access to it. The map provides grounds for rejecting the assumption without diminishing the consequences of the voyages.

A defender of the conventional terminology might therefore advance a narrower case. European oceanic expansion changed the scale, frequency, and consequences of contact; “Age of Discovery” names that transformation, however imperfectly. But if transformation is the intended meaning, the chosen term still requires scrutiny. Discovery directs attention towards the acquisition of knowledge by the traveller. It is less adequate to the experience of societies confronted by newcomers whose commercial and political ambitions could alter the conditions of their lives. Different participants inhabited the same events without undergoing the same historical process.

The problem is especially acute when knowledge of other societies becomes difficult to distinguish from claims over them. To discover a place is easily made to sound like a service performed for it. The labour of prior inhabitants then appears as background, while the outsider’s recognition becomes the event worthy of commemoration. A historical vocabulary should make this asymmetry available for examination. It should not settle it quietly in the choice of a period’s name.

There is no need, however, to make the opposite mistake and declare every European account merely an instrument of domination. Observation could be careful, discoveries could be real for those making them, and new connections could produce knowledge unavailable before. The objection concerns the privilege granted to one sequence of these activities. Europe’s experiences require the same specification that historians routinely demand of Korean, Chinese, or Islamic geographical traditions.

This principle has a practical consequence for writing world history. The Kangnido should occupy more than the position of an impressive preliminary to European cartographic achievement. Its compilers had purposes, authorities, and geographical problems of their own. Their work belongs to a history of knowledge that continued across political boundaries and linguistic differences, and whose importance does not depend upon whether it contributed directly to a later European voyage. To admit the map only as an anticipation of Europe would preserve the very chronology it calls into question.

The phrase “Age of Discovery” can retain a limited use as a description of European ventures, provided the qualification is explicit and the experiences of others remain visible. As a universal account of how the world became known, it is indefensible. The Kangnido does not supply a complete geography with which to replace it. It supplies evidence that the supposed object of discovery had already been assembled into other accounts of the world, through other acts of observation, borrowing, correction, and judgement. Europe’s later expansion altered the conditions under which those accounts would be read and remembered. It did not give Europe’s encounter with the world the right to stand for the world’s first knowledge of itself.

References

Kwon Kŭn. Preface to the Kangnido, 1402. Translated in Gari Ledyard, “Cartography in Korea,” 244–245.

Ledyard, Gari. “Cartography in Korea.” In The History of Cartography, vol. 2, bk. 2, Cartography in the Traditional East and Southeast Asian Societies, edited by J. B. Harley and David Woodward, 235–345. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Full chapter.