Regnum Chinae: The Printed Western Maps of China to 1735 (Brill, 2022) does something that no one has ever done before: collect just about every Western printed map of China, from 1584 up until Jean-Baptiste d’Anville’s landmark map in 1735.

Marco Caboara, along with his fellow researchers, worked tirelessly to catalog and track down these many different documents, and tells the stories behind each one: “stories marked by scholarly breakthroughs, obsession, missionary zeal, commercial sagacity, and greed.”

Marco Caboara is the Digital Scholarship & Archives Manager at the Lee Shau Kee Library at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.

In this interview, Marco and I talk about this project, what it says about how Europeans understood China, and his favorite maps in the collection.

You can find more reviews, excerpts, interviews, and essays at The Asian Review of Books, including its review of Regnum Chinae. Follow on Twitter at @BookReviewsAsia.

Nicholas Gordon is an associate editor for a global magazine, and a reviewer for the Asian Review of Books. He can be found on Twitter at @nickrigordon.

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