1800 Chinese Administrative Manuscript Map of Wuhua County, Guangdong, China

A large and finely executed c. 1800 late Qing Chinese manuscript map of Changle County (長樂縣), now Wuhua County, in eastern Guangdong Province. A rare example of a Qing-era administrative map, it displays a great deal of information about the county while also hinting at the limits of Qing authority.

A Closer Look

The map details the course of the Meijiang River as it divides into the Wuhua River, to the northwest, and the Qinjiang River, to the southeast. Numerous villages, as well as many of the area's famous mountains, including Ma'an Shan, Yanwei Shan, Guija Shan, and Dongshan Shan, among others, are labelled. The walled county seat of Changle (marked here as 城), now Huacheng Town (华城镇), is illustrated near the meeting point of the Wuhua and Tanxia Rivers.

Orange borders define township divisions, with some 400 villages noted. Neighboring counties are documented along the borders of Changle county. Extensive textual annotations in the upper right and along the bottom describe the governing structure of the region, hinting at the map's administrative purpose. The squares created by gridlines each constitute 20 li (里), a measurement which varied by time and place but with one li usually equaling roughly one-third of an English mile. The text immediately following the title gives the latitude and longitude of the county seat, with Beijing serving as Prime Meridian.

The descriptions of areas around the county seat are somewhat more detailed than those further away, and some of the names of towns in the far southeast of the county had to be erased and rewritten, suggesting that Qing administrative control was minimal there.

Publication History and Census

This map is undated, but from the style, paper, content, and workmanship, we can loosely date it to the late 18th or early 19th century. The name Zhou Yifan (周一帆) appears at right just above the text portion at bottom, along with the phrase '水寨,' which would generally refer to coastal and maritime defenses. Perhaps, then, Zhou was a military official tasked with defenses on the Meijiang. Chinese administrative maps from the late Qing are extremely rare and almost never appear on the market.