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Holly Chik

Long before the digital age, a Ming dynasty scholar made it his mission to map human knowledge from a Chinese perspective.
The result was an encyclopaedia spanning 127 volumes known as the Tushu Bian, or Compendium of Illustrations and Texts.
The work – published in 1613 – was compiled by Neo-Confucian scholar Zhang Huang and drew on more than 200 printed sources across several decades to document the concepts of heaven, Earth and humanity.
“His goal was to gather all the illustrations and texts an educated person needed to understand the world,” information designer Paul Kahn, who analysed the encyclopaedia, wrote in his book Mapping Knowledge Across Time: Seven Books That Visualised the World.
“The result was too costly to print during his lifetime. It was eventually carved on woodblocks and printed after his death,” Kahn wrote.

Kahn compared the Tushu Bian with six other books that described the world from the perspective of Euro-Mediterranean culture.
“The Tushu Bian was chosen because it is an enormous visual summary of Chinese culture from the period when Asia and the West were interacting,” he wrote.
In an interview, Kahn said the Chinese work’s depiction of the Grand Canal and major rivers set it apart from the others.
The Grand Canal is a vast waterway system that runs from Beijing southward across the Yellow River to canals and tributaries merging with the Yangtze River near the modern-day city of Yangzhou.
“In all of the European books, there are many examples of understanding river and maritime networks and showing how people travel from one continent to another,” Kahn said.
“For example, there are several reproductions of the Danube River network that covers all of central and northern Europe.
“In all of those cases, they are represented as networks and lines connecting one place to another. But in the Tushu Bian, the rivers are represented as continuous, detailed descriptions of every place on the river.”
Unlike modern maps that use a bird’s-eye view or a north-south orientation, the Tushu Bian often presents these rivers horizontally, flowing from right to left, regardless of cardinal directions.
“Orientation is based on convention,” Kahn said. “What you see is based on what is in your mind. If your mind has certain conventions that north should be at the top, and you look at an image, you do not recognise what you are looking at because it is not matching your expectations.”
He noted that there was more flexibility in today’s mobile phone map applications.
“They can change the representation if they are well designed … to meet the needs of the person who is using it,” he said.
The Tushu Bian also described the human body as a channel for the primordial qi – energy inherited from one’s parents – to connect heaven and Earth, with detailed diagrams of human organs.
“There is no representation of the human body as connected to the natural world or as a microcosm in the other books, with the exception of the Catalan Atlas,” according to Kahn.
He said the world atlas from the 14th century “includes a human figure with each of the parts of the external body, not showing the internal organs”.
“It shows this figure that is related to astrological information and numerical instructions” on when to perform bloodletting, a common medical procedure at the time.

In the Tushu Bian, one diagram shows internal organs contained in a pear-shaped outline, with the spinal vertebrae portrayed as bones. Another diagram renders the spine as a sequence of connected circles linked to the head.
The view is from the side, which Kahn said might have been done to show the spine and spinal column. “Within that tradition, the location of different parts of the spine is correlated with different parts of the organs, and so I think that was why they did it that way.”
According to Kahn, Zhang gathered information for the Tushu Bian that could benefit his students, but it was also a resource that could be used to prepare for the imperial examination – the selection process for government workers.
“An aspiring candidate might spend decades preparing for the exam,” Kahn wrote. “The people who tried and failed to pass the exam made up much of the literate population.”
The Tushu Bian makes no mention of the seven naval expeditions led by Admiral Zheng He between 1405 and 1433. It depicts the world through a collection of maps centred on the Chinese Empire, with limited representation of surrounding “tribute” countries.
“The greatest detail of the outside world is devoted to places where the Chinese were defending against invasions,” Kahn wrote in his book.
He told the SCMP: “These amazing gigantic maritime expeditions that had happened during the same dynasty, not that long before, are completely ignored. I would interpret that to mean that he is making decisions about what the people that he wants to see this should be paying attention to.”

Kahn noted the need to evaluate where information comes from – whether it is a historical visualisation or the AI-generated content and deepfakes of today.
“One lesson that we are learning over and over again is to try and understand the source of the material and become critical in terms of how you judge what you see based on [whether this] is an eyewitness account or someone’s story about a story they heard from someone else,” he said.
Kahn gave the example of the Atlas Historique, which was published in Amsterdam in the 18th century and featured illustrations of the Mughal Empire in India.
They were copied directly from the personal art collection of an Italian diplomat. Dutch United East India Company traders had brought the works to the Netherlands from India and China.
“He had essentially a museum of paintings that were made in India, and the people who did the Atlas Historique went to the museum and they copied them. In this case, they were copying something that was much more authentic,” Kahn said.
“When you look at them compared to the images that they created of people in Japan and China, you can see that they are much less European looking,” he said. “The lesson is when you look at a whole range of images like this, try to become sensitive to what is it about the image that represents some kind of authenticity or closer to the source.”


This story has been amended to reflect the correct spelling of Paul Kahn's name.


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Ming dynasty work shows how Chinese understood the world in the 1600s

Barges sail on the Grand Canal in Huaian, eastern China. The canal is among the waterways depicted in the Tushu Bian. Photo: AFP

The Ten Thousand Li of the Yangtze River from the Tushu Bian. Photo: Handout

A diagram of the human body from Zhang Huang’s work. Photo: Handout

Illustrations of the Mughal Empire in India featured in Atlas Historique. Photo: Handout

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Scholar Zhang Huang set out to document heaven, Earth and humanity in vast compendium described as a ‘visual summary of Chinese culture’


Scholar Zhang Huang set out to document heaven, Earth and humanity in vast compendium described as a ‘visual summary of Chinese culture’.


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Ming dynasty work shows how Chinese understood the world in the 1600s

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Scholar Zhang Huang set out to document heaven, Earth and humanity in vast compendium described as a ‘visual summary of Chinese culture’

Scholar Zhang Huang set out to document heaven, Earth and humanity in vast compendium described as a ‘visual summary of Chinese culture’