54—— World maps of China and Korea in the early Ming Dynasty.

As the oldest, largest and most well-preserved map of the ancient world in the world, The Mixed Map of Daming (Figure 1) was drawn in the Hongwu period in the early Ming Dynasty (1389), showing us the whole world that China people could see in the14th century. The main body of the map is China's territory, which is relatively accurate. To the east, North Korea and Japan, the Japanese territory is drawn much larger than the reality. It is particularly noteworthy that the map has been drawn westward to Africa and Europe, and the outlines of Arabian Peninsula and Red Sea can also be roughly recognized. However, on the whole, the drawing scale is distorted and too small. However, we have to admit and be surprised that at least before Zheng He's voyage to the West and Diaz 1488 discovered the Cape of Good Hope, the world map drawn by China people can roughly and accurately outline the southernmost coastline of Africa. According to the report, the base map of this map also comes from Li Zemin's "Covered Map of Sound Education" and Jun Qing's "Mixed Map" in the Yuan Dynasty. Later, the North Korean emissary took the opportunity to bring back copies of these maps of the Yuan Dynasty to North Korea from the envoys of the Ming Dynasty. After their own research and revision, they added more detailed and accurate map materials of North Korea and Japan, so they merged into a new map at 1402, which is the map of North Korea (Figure 2-3). Because of this, the three maps look roughly similar, but they are different. For example, North Korea's territory is too large, and the so-called Dragon Valley Edition copied by the Japanese (Figure 2) does not draw Japan; In the later version of Honkoji (Figure 3), some Japanese territories were added and modified more accurately. From the comparison of these three homologous world maps, perhaps we can see that in the process of map circulation, different times and different countries will show slightly different concepts of world geography. What is even more surprising is that East Asians have long had a clear geographical concept of distant Europe and Africa, although it is not accurate enough. The western world depicted on the left side of these three maps is one of the powerful proofs.