A chart based on Zheng He's voyages (fig. 23) is found in a printed work entitled Wubei zhi (Treatise on Military Preparations) completed by Mao Yuanji about 1621 (the date of the book's preface), and presented to the throne in 1628. Mao does not name the source of the map, but there is little question that it is based extensively on Zheng's voyages. "His maps," Mao states, "record carefully and correctly the distances of the road and the various countries and I have inserted them for the information of posterity and as a momento of [his] military achievements."80 We know from the text of the Treatise that maps and information were collected before each of Zheng's voyages, and that charts were compared and corrected for compass bearings and guiding stars, with copies made of drawings of the configuration of islands, water bodies, and the land.81 The map, as it has survived, however, appears to have been constructed in part from textual sources.
Originally, the Wubei zhi chart was probably a long, single piece, stored as a scroll, though for the book it was divided into a series of strips. One consequence of the strip format (whether in scroll or segmented) is that orientation is not consistent. In addition, scale is stretched and compressed according to the amount of detail included in a particular section. The cluttered and dangerous coastal area of Singapore, for example, is drawn on a scale more than three times larger than that of the east coast of Malaya and two-and-a-half that of the west coast.82
The map included sailing instructions that modern scholars have found to be fairly accurate.83 Sailing the Malacca and Singapore Straits from west to east, the pilot guide states that (using modern compass bearings)
having made the Aroa Islands, setting a course of 120° and then of 110°, after 3 watches the ship is abreast of [South Sands]. Setting a course of 115° and then 120° for 3 watches the ship comes abreast of [Cotton Island]. After 10 watches on a course of 130' the ship is abreast of [Malacca]. Setting sail from Malacca on a course of 130°, after 5 watches the ship is abreast of [Gunong Banang]; after 3 watches on a course of 130° the ship is abreast of [Pulau Pisang]...84
From Pulau Pisang, a course of 135° brings them to Karimun, and from there, 5 watches of 115° and then 120° and the ship makes Blakang Mati, passing out through Dragon-Teeth Strait. With 5 watches at 85°, the vessel then reaches Pedra Branca (Pulau Batu Puteh), and after passing Pedra Branca, sets a course of 25° and then 15° for 5 watches, which brings the ship abreast of 'East Bamboo Mountain', one of the two peaks of Pulau Aur. Finally, setting a course of 350° and then 15°, the ship passes outside of Pulau Condor.
The budding commercial empire pioneered by Zheng He was short-lived. After the death in 1424 of the emperor who sponsored him, Yung-lo, and the death of Zheng He himself a decade later, Chinese authorities rejected any further forays in the southern seas. Commerce in the Indian Ocean trade was once again relinquished to networks of Muslim and Southeast Asian traders on the eve of the Portuguese penetration of eastern waters.
Japan and Korea
Although Japanese vessels were plying Southeast Asian seas from about the turn of the fifteenth century, no Japanese charts are known prior to the arrival of a substantive European presence in the region. Japanese traders were already well familiar with the South China Sea when Europeans first appeared in those waters, and are mentioned, for example, by Spanish sailors reaching the northern Philippine islands of Luzon and Mindoro in the 1560s, yet Japanese mapmaking of Southeast Asian waters is not known until after Europeans introduced their chartmaking techniques into Japan in the latter sixteenth century. These charts of maritime Southeast Asia were known as nankai karuta (south-sea charts), as differentiated from charts of their own coasts, nihon karuta.
'India' appears in early symbolic Japanese and Korean maps of the world which were inspired by Buddhist pilgrimages to holy sites in the land where Buddha was born. One such world view which may have had a place in China, Japan, and Korea was the so-called Buddhist world map, or Gotenjiku ('Five Indias'). Inspired by the travels of a Chinese monk in the Tang Dynasty, named Xuanzhuang (602-64), the world is depicted here in the shape of an egg, with north, the larger end of the egg, uppermost. As in many other world views which have their origins in Buddhist and Hindu cosmologies, Mount Sumeru lies at the center. Southeast Asia is not recorded on this map as such; a 'Mr. Malaya' in the south is another mythical mountain on whose summit sirs the 'Castle of Lanka'.
Fig. 24 Map of the world, Chonhado ('Map of all under heaven'), manuscript, Korean, probably seventeenth or eighteenth century. Among the countries in the inner ocean ring are the 'islands' of Siam and Cambodia. (26.8 x 32.4 cm) [Martayan Lan, New York]
Southeast Asia is, however, recorded in a popular Korean view of the world known as the 'Map of all under heaven', or Ch'ŏnhado (fig. 24). This particular representation of the world probably originated in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and was copied with little or no change into the nineteenth century. The Ch'ŏnhado did not reflect the best geographic knowledge available to the society which created it, but, as with the more enduring naive maps in Europe, it is doubtful whether this was its authors' intention. The map depicts a central landmass comprising China, Korea, and several historical and mythical countries. In the inner of the two encircling oceans lie the world's island countries, which in addition to Japan and the Ryukyus, include the 'islands' of Cambodia and Thailand. Mainland Southeast Asia was a long sea voyage from Korea, and it is understandable that Cambodia and Thailand would have been treated as islands like Japan and the Ryukyus (just as many Western mapmakers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries believed Korea to be an island). Reinforcing the idea of Cambodia and Thailand's insularity was the cultural 'sea' separating them from China and Korea, the mapmaker envisioning them as lands of a different tradition and people.
The ocean sea which harbors these 'islands' is itself ringed by land. While the central landmass and its neighboring 'islands' embrace both the real and the fictional, this outer ring of land records exclusively fictional places and features. The Ch'ŏnhado remained popular through the late nineteenth century.
The Arab View of Southeast Asia
Arab pilots began searching the shores of Southeast Asia for spices and drugs in the early seventh century. The information by these sailors and traders, who were primarily interested in commerce rather than in science for its own sake, subsequently appeared in travelers' accounts, and in the geographical, historical, and medical (herbal) treatises which, in turn, drew on these accounts. The earliest known compilations of Arab travelers' tales dealing with Southeast Asia, date from the mid-ninth century, though some of the stories which appear in them are older.85 Some authors interviewed their informants directly, but most- in particular the later geographers -simply copied and elaborated upon earlier writings. This material is the source of most of what is known of the early Arab experience in Southeast Asian waters.
Most of the places mentioned in the various Arabic geographies and navigational tracts cannot be identified with certainty, nor can they even be presumed to have always represented the same place to each sailor or author. Although most of the locations commonly mentioned were originally based on fact, many gradually assumed a mythological status, slowly becoming the progeny of sailors' lore. Some of the fanciful places may derive from the Alexander Romances, or perhaps from attempts to reconcile Ptolemaic geography with the Qur'an.
Arab geographic knowledge of Southeast Asia after about 1000 was beset by two major problems. First, geographers failed to tap reports of more recent voyages to the region, if such information was available. Instead, the centuries-old stories, by now largely mythicized, continued to