Two Views of the Chinese Coast

About

Join us for "Two Views of the Chinese Coast," a talk by Kären Wigen, the Frances & Charles Field Professor in Stanford's Department of History, at the David Rumsey Map Center. When cartographic collections began to appear online in the 1990s, historians of East Asia were quick to seize on maps as subjects for research. Over the next thirty years, a sophisticated field of critical map studies developed, illuminating the lively landscape of cartographic production across the early modern Sinosphere. While map-focused research made rapid strides, a gap gradually opened between cartographic research (the history of maps) and what we might call map-informed history (history with maps).

This talk attempts to address that gap by investigating two works from Stanford University Libraries’ collections: a Qing-era scroll painting of the Pacific coast, housed in the David Rumsey Map Collection, and a British map of the same shoreline from 1859, owned by a private collector and held digitally within the Barry Lawrence Ruderman Map Collection. During the 19th century, both maps served as tools of military planning; where the Qing scroll was likely consulted for coastal defense, the British chart was designed for a naval attack. By putting them in dialogue with each other, the talk suggests how cross-cultural map comparison can help us tell more complex, entangled stories about Euro-Asian interaction.

Speaker Bio

Kären Wigen teaches Japanese history and the history of cartography. A geographer by training, she earned her doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley. Her first book, The Making of a Japanese Periphery, 1750-1920 (1995), mapped the economic transformation of southern Nagano Prefecture during the heyday of the silk industry. Her second book, A Malleable Map: Geographies of Restoration in Central Japan, 1600-1912 (2010), returned to the ground of that study, exploring the roles of cartography, chorography, and regionalism in the making of modern Shinano. An abiding interest in world history led her to co-author The Myth of Continents (1997) with Martin Lewis. She also introduced a forum on oceans in history for the American Historical Review and co-edited Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges (2007) with Jerry Bentley and Renate Bridenthal. Her latest book is Territorial Imaginaries: Beyond the Sovereign Map (2025).

Event details

This event is available to attend in-person or remotely via livestream.

Please register to attend the event in-person as seating is limited. The livestream will be available on YouTube on November 19, at 4pm.