Ancient East Asian Maps

This collection consists of almost 40 East Asian maps, manuscripts, woodblock prints and rubbings, in Chinese, Japanese and Mongolian. It features all the ancient maps in East Asian languages in our holdings.

The collection features rubbings of Song dynasty maps steles, Ming local maps on silk, a magnificent Edo manuscript copy of Matteo Ricci’s world map mounted on a folded screen, monumental maps of the Qing empire and highly pictorial manuscript maps of Taiwan and Inner Mongolia.

Most of the maps have been acquired in 2021 and 2022. A few have been in our holdings since the late 1990s.