A study of early Chinese maps using interdisciplinary methods. This is the first English-language monograph on the early history of maps in China, centering on those found in three tombs that date from the fourth to the second century BCE and constitute the entire known corpus of early Chinese maps (ditu). More than a millennium separates them from the next available map in the early twelfth century CE. Unlike extant studies that draw heavily from the history of cartography, this book offers an alternative perspective by mobilizing methods from art history, archaeology, material culture, religion, and philosophy. It examines the diversity of forms and functions in early Chinese ditu to argue that these pictures did not simply represent natural topography and built environments, but rather made and remade worlds for the living and the dead. Wang explores the multifaceted and multifunctional diagrammatic tradition of rendering space in early China.

"This is the first English-language monograph on the early history of cartography in China. Its chief players are three maps found in tombs that date from the fourth to the second century BCE and together constitute the entire known corpus of ancient Chinese maps (ditu). A millennium separates them from the next available map from 1136 CE. Most scholars study them through the lens of modern, empirical definitions of maps and their use. This book offers an alternative view by drawing on methods not just from cartography but from art history, archaeology, and religion. It argues that, as tomb objects, the maps were designed to be simultaneously functional for the living and the dead-that each map was drawn to serve navigational purposes of guiding the living from one town to another as well as to diagram ritual order, thereby taming the unknown territory of the dead. In contrast with traditional scholarship, The Art of Terrestrial Diagrams in Early China proposes that ditu can "speak" through their forms. Departing from dominant theories of representation that forge a narrow path from form to meaning, the book braids together two main strands of argumentation to explore the multifaceted and multifunctional diagrammatic tradition of rendering space in early China"--

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications. Focusing on Zhou's work, Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person's command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.

Ancient Chinese walls, such as the Great Wall of China, were not sovereign border lines. Instead, sovereign space was zonally exerted with monarchical powers expressed gradually over an area, based on possibilities for administrative action. The dynamically shifting, ritualized articulation of early Chinese sovereignty affects the interpretation of the spatial application of state force, including its cartographic representations. In Designing Boundaries in Early China, Garret Pagenstecher Olberding draws on a wide array of source materials concerning the territorialization of space to make a compelling case for how sovereign spaces were defined and regulated in this part of the ancient world. By considering the ways sovereignty extended itself across vast expanses in early China, Olberding informs our understanding of the ancient world and the nature of modern nation-states.

The traditional Chinese notion of itself as the “middle kingdom”—literally the cultural and political center of the world—remains vital to its own self-perceptions and became foundational to Western understandings of China. This worldview was primarily constructed during the earliest imperial unification of China during the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE). But the fragmentation of empire and subsequent “Age of Disunion” (220–589 CE) that followed undermined imperial orthodoxies of unity, centrality, and universality. In response, geographical writing proliferated, exploring greater spatial complexities and alternative worldviews. This book is the first study of the emergent genre of geographical writing and the metageographies that structured its spatial thought during that period. Early medieval geographies highlighted spatial units and structures that the Qin–Han empire had intentionally sought to obscure—including those of regional, natural, and foreign spaces. Instead, these postimperial metageographies reveal a polycentric China in a polycentric world. Sui–Tang (581–906 CE) officials reasserted the imperial model as spatial orthodoxy. But since that time these alternative frameworks have persisted in geographical thought, continuing to illuminate spatial complexities that have been incompatible with the imperial and nationalist ideal of a monolithic China at the center of the world.

Tian, or Heaven, had multiple meanings in early China. It had been used since the Western Zhou to indicate both the sky and the highest god, and later came to be regarded as a force driving the movement of the cosmos and as a home to deities and imaginary animals. By the Han dynasty, which saw an outpouring of visual materials depicting Heaven, the concept of Heaven encompassed an immortal realm to which humans could ascend after death. Using excavated materials, Lillian Tseng shows how Han artisans transformed various notions of Heaven—as the mandate, the fantasy, and the sky—into pictorial entities. The Han Heaven was not indicated by what the artisans looked at, but rather was suggested by what they looked into. Artisans attained the visibility of Heaven by appropriating and modifying related knowledge of cosmology, mythology, astronomy. Thus the depiction of Heaven in Han China reflected an interface of image and knowledge. By examining Heaven as depicted in ritual buildings, on household utensils, and in the embellishments of funerary settings, Tseng maintains that visibility can hold up a mirror to visuality; Heaven was culturally constructed and should be culturally reconstructed.