Overview
From Paula Curtis Collection[1]: Mao Kun Explorer is a digital mapping project tracing the travels of Zheng He is the Ming Dynasty. The top-half of the screen is a Chinese map that represents the Ming Dynasty’s best understanding of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.
Starting from the imperial palace in Nanjing, it follows the Yangtze River to the coast, heads south around the Malay Peninsula and crosses the ocean, past India to the island of Hormuz. The coast of Africa doubles back along the bottom of the map, reaching all the way to Mozambique. All this territory is contorted and compressed into a long, narrow map that could be woodblock-printed onto a single scroll or twenty pages of a book. The data displayed in this map is available in CSV and GeoJSON formats.
- Institution/Author: Ryan Carpenter
- Period: Premodern
- Geographic Focus: China,Asia
- Access: Open Access
Digital Humanities Resources on East Asia by Dr. Paula R. Curtis ↩︎