A detail of the Ming dynasty map of Chinese trading routes detailed in 'Mr Selden's Map of China' Credit: Photo: Bodleian Library In 2009, the historian Robert Batchelor called up a mysterious ...

Emperor Yongle, the first ruler of the Ming dynasty, wanted to showcase China's naval power, and in 1402 commissioned Zheng to undertake a daring mission to the seas known to the Chinese as the ...

Great Ming Dynasty Amalgamated Map. Painted in color on silk and published in around 1389 during the Ming Dynasty. Again, it shows Hainan Island as the southernmost territory of China.

Within the imperial chambers of the Wanli Emperor (萬曆), sovereign of the Ming Dynasty from 1563 to 1620, could be found an encyclopedic work of cartographic craftsmanship unlike anything existing in ...

What the collapse of the Ming Dynasty can tell us about American decline. ... Chinese "world" maps, by contrast, were almost entirely China, with a few outlying areas at the periphery.

2. Diaoyu Dao had long been under China's jurisdiction. In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, China placed Diaoyu Dao under its coastal defense to guard against the invasion of Japanese pirates ...

The Ming Dynasty was founded by Zhu Yuanzhang (reigned 1368–1398), a cowherd from a poor family in eastern China’s Anhui Province who went on to lead a peasant uprising that toppled the Mongol ...

It is the only Ming Dynasty map of this size and scale that covers South-east Asia. It is special for it does away with depicting China as the centre of the world. Instead, South-east Asia is its ...