Maps in Ancient China, A Classical Legend
| History of science and technology in China |
|---|
| Inventions |
| Discoveries |
| By era |
| Han Dynasty |
| Tang Dynasty |
| Song Dynasty |
| People's Republic of China |
| Present-day China |
There is a classical Chinese legend called “He Bo Xian Tu” about the ancient map. It is said that in the time of “Dayu’s Taming of the Floods” (roughly during the Xia Dynasty), a river god gave Dayu a stone with a flood map etched upon its surface. Dayu used this map to hold back the flooding that threatened to devastate the rural agriculture. Another account attributes Dayu's deeds as a marvelous feat of engineering.
In general, the development of early Chinese cartography experienced three phrases: primitive map, classical map, and survey map. The primitive maps were simple maps, still steeped in myth and legend. It wasn't until the Han Dynasty that classical maps began to emerge.
Read more about this topic: Early Chinese Cartography
Famous quotes containing the words maps in, maps, ancient, classical and/or legend:
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“Living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, then, soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, and nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate on maps in statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)
“You are our surety to immortal life,
God’s hatred of the universal stain—
The heritage, O Fear, of ancient strife
Compounded with the tissue of the vein.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Several classical sayings that one likes to repeat had quite a different meaning from the ones later times attributed to them.”
—Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749–1832)
“We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.”
—Hugo Ball (1886–1927)