It can be said that in this process of transformation, Chek Chue was gradually displaced by Hung Heung Lou, and Hung Heung Lou was displaced in turn by Hong Kong. There are two ways in which this displacement could have taken place. The first is Hong Kong (or Hung Heung Lou) displacing the place Chek Chue. This is a form of geographical transfer (at least geographical as understood in the context of cartographical discourse). In the second way, the signifier “Hong Kong” displaced the signifier “Chek Chue” and became the name of a more or less specific place on the map. No matter which is the case, it implies that one place can be replaced by another at any time, and the place being taken over will never be the same as before even though its form and position may remain unchanged.
There exists an even more radical theory that attempts to define the concept of “displace” in a broad sense, and in so doing extends it to a general and fundamental level. According to this theory, every place on a map is a displace. A place is never itself but is forever displaced by another. This is also to say that the map itself is a displacement, and cartography is such a process of displacement. No matter whether we understand them from the perspective of teleology or of utilitarianism, and no matter how scientifically and with what exactitude they are produced, maps have never been copies of the real world but are displacements. In the end, the real world is totally supplanted in the process of displacement and fades from human cognition. The sight of the Guangdong coast in the sixteenth century is forever beyond reach, but not the sight of the sixteenth century “Coastal Map of Guangdong.”
Traditional cartography seemingly instructs us on how to recognize and search for places, but in fact its real lesson is that we can never arrive at our desired place on the map, and yet, at the same time, we inevitably arrive at its displace.
5
ANTIPLACE
The “Map of the Sun-on-district,” drawn by the Italian missionary Simeone Volonteri in 1866, delineates in minute detail the positions of villages on the British-governed Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula as well as in the adjacent areas of San-on County, which at the time was still Chinese territory. Father Volonteri’s original plan was to have the map engraved in London, so as to acquire enough subscribers to cover the expenses of publication, and with the map would be attached a free copy of a pamphlet on cartography written by Volonteri himself. The engraving was eventually done in Leipzig for considerations of cost, while the complimentary pamphlets were discontinued following complications in matters of distribution. It is said, however, that two hundred copies of the pamphlets had been printed in London, although with the exception of a few copies presented as gifts to fellow cartographers, none survived the passage of time.
In his pamphlet, Volonteri proposed the concept of antiplace and illustrated it with examples from his “Map of the Sun-on-district.” It might be conjectured that the “Map of the Sun-on-district” was in fact a supplement for the purpose of illustrating the concept of antiplace. Since the pamphlets were lost while the maps survived, the theory of antiplace also fell into oblivion. It is now impossible to reconstruct Volonteri’s theory of antiplace. The most anyone can do is to piece together fragments of information scattered among surviving sources.
When the conditions of two places are the diametrical opposites of each other, Volonteri calls them antiplaces. The establishment of antiplaces has nothing to do with the relative positions of two places on a map. Any two points at the ends of any diameter of the earth, thus opposite each other in position on the surface of the sphere, are called antipodes. An example of antipodes is the North Pole and the South Pole, but since they have virtually no difference in weather conditions and environment, that is, in their state of being, they cannot be regarded as antiplaces. The methods of searching for or calculating antiplaces are no longer known to the modern cartographer, and the only example left is to be found in Volonteri’s “Map of the Sun-on-district.”
In the “Map of the Sun-on-district,” there is a place on the Kowloon Peninsula called Mong Kok (mango point), which is said to be the antiplace of Sha Tau Kok (sand head point), on the coast of the northeastern mainland on the map. By 1866, the Kowloon Peninsula was British territory, while Sha Tau Kok was still under the rule of the Qing dynasty. It was not until 1898 that Sha Tau Kok, as an insignificant part of the newly leased New Territories, came under British rule. After that, Sha Tau Kok became a guard post on the Sino-British boundary. According to the antiplace theory, Mong Kok and Sha Tau Kok represent, respectively, the center and the periphery of Hong Kong, each related to the other as polar opposites. In the twentieth century, Mong Kok became a commercial district with the highest population density in the territory, while the name Sha Tau Kok has become a synonym for “wilderness” in colloquial usage, with connotations of backwardness and dereliction. This is the interpretation offered by scholars who have studied Volonteri’s postulation of Mong Kok and Sha Tau Kok as antiplaces, but the question of how Volonteri could, in 1866, predict what was going to happen to the two places in the century ahead is still short of a satisfactory answer.1
There is another argument to the effect that the “anti” in “antiplace” originates from the word “antithesis,” such that “antiplace” means “antithetical place.” The term “antithesis” should here be understood in its rhetorical sense, that is, the pairing of opposite ideas in speech or writing for apologetic effects. The opposition of Mong Kok and Sha Tau Kok generates a series of rhetorical antitheses, for example segregation/integration, distance/proximity, separation/reunion, oblivion/remembrance, hate/love. This is why one can say that antiplace is antithesis, and place is thesis. Mong Kok and Sha Tau Kok can be characterized as being in a relationship that has love as its thesis.
This actually coincides with a third interpretation of the term “antiplace.” In this theory “anti” is explained as “going against” or “undoing,” so that being an antiplace means to desert, betray, subvert, forget, and deny the physicality of a place and to deprive it of its material existence, and in so doing turning it into something abstract: a concept, name, image, impression, desire, or fantasy. The meaning of a place for us is thus no longer general, objective, and scientific but individual and irrational—a kind of irrational thesis.
1 For further studies on the “Map of the Sun-on-district,” see the Geographical Journal, June 1969, and the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 1970.
6
NONPLACE
Nonplace does not mean no place, nor does it mean a nonexistent place. It just lacks certain conditions that a place should have, such as a name and a referential reality. Commonsense tells us that to have a name but no referential reality, or to have referential reality but no name, does not count as a “place” in the strict sense. Yet, for a cartographer, so long as it is included in the area of a map, even though it does not have a name or a referential reality, no two-dimensional space at any bearing should ever be denied the legitimacy of being a “place.” It is for this reason that we call this kind of “place” to which attaches no name and no referential reality a “nonplace.”
Two nonplaces appear on the map of the 1819 edition of the San-on County Gazetteer. One of them appears in the waters south of Kowloon Shun, as an island surrounded by Yeung Suen Chau, Chek Chue, Po Toi, Fook Kin Tau, and Tai Kam Mun. The rectangular label above the image of the island is left blank, unlike other, similar rectangles, which have names. To the west of Kowloon Shun and to the north of Lei Yu Mun Fortress and Tuen Mun Shun, another blank label lies over the waters. Again, a large unnamed island, which appears to the east of Lantao in “A Sketch of the Islands to the S.E. of Lantao on the Coast of China,” drawn by Chinese hands and printed by Alexander Dalrymple in 1786, may well be another case of nonplace. There are also records of nonplaces on maps drawn by foreigners, a good example being Captain Hayter’s 1780 “A Chart of the China Sea from the Island of Sanciam to Pedra Branca.” A relatively small, obscure island to the east of a larger island called
He-ong-kong would also seem to fall into the category of nonplace.
Cartographers have disputed for years the causes of nonplaces and their significance. Some say that nonplaces appear to satisfy people’s fantasies about unknown places; others propose the opposite, claiming that the existence of nonplaces actually negates our knowledge of places, for a nonplace is a place that does not exist, a mirror image, a mirage that is visible but intangible, and that exists but is not to be experienced.
Later scholars have established that the nonplace of Dalrymple’s “A Sketch of the Islands to the S.E. of Lantao on the Coast of China” in 1786 is actually what eventually became known as Hong Kong Island.
7
EXTRATERRITORIALITY
Extraterritoriality has always been a controversial concept in cartographical studies. The term “territory” has never been a simple and neutral indication of a place but implies by necessity occupation, subordination, and administration, all of which carry connotations of a master-servant power relation. It demonstrates how an authority legitimizes its possession of a place, and how this process of legitimization is inevitably implemented through the production of maps. This argument alone is enough to disprove the attempts of some scholars at delimiting cartography as merely a set of technical exercises based on natural geographical realities. For maps are not just a depiction, record, or symbol of power but the actual execution of power itself. The scramble for territorial sovereignty over places through acts of documentation has always been an alternative battlefield, apart from direct warfare, between countries and between power entities.
The concept of extraterritoriality is hardly imaginable given the boundless desire of powers to territorize places, and it is incompatible with the nature of mapmaking as a means of territorization. Yet we do not have much difficulty in finding examples of extraterritoriality in the literature of cartography. In a German map from 1834 called “The Chinese Coast of the Province of Kwang-tung on Both Sides of the Meridian of Macao,” we can see that along the green coastline there are two islands marked in red called Hong Kong and Lamma. According to the explanation on the map, this map is based on “Macao Roads,” the marine chart drawn by Ross and Maughan in 1810. The later map is improved in accuracy, but the fact that Hong Kong Island and Lamma Island are printed in red remains puzzling. It is said that the general practice in those days was to represent British territory in red. However, Hong Kong had not yet become a British colony in the year the map was produced. Does this imply that Hong Kong had already ceased to be a part of Chinese territory in the year 1834 and had become an extraterritory that was independent of, or rather abandoned by, the rest of the world?
An extraterritory can be indicated by markings dissimilar from those for ordinary territories, but it can also be done in the opposite manner. In the map “The Coast of South China” drawn in China about 1850 by an unknown person, we can see that to the south of Kwun Foo Shan, Kowloon Fort, and Yeung Suen Chau there remains only empty waters where Hong Kong Island should have lain. It seems that the method of exclusion has been employed to render invisible the fact of Hong Kong’s being a part of Chinese territory. In fact, Hong Kong had already been ceded to the British by that time. The subtle thing about the map is that, while excluding Hong Kong from Chinese territory, it denies the possession of Hong Kong by the British at the same time. By wiping British Hong Kong off the map, it banishes Hong Kong to the realm of extraterritoriality. The act signifies a refusal to accept any sovereign authority or even a complete repudiation of the existence of sovereignty itself, for an extraterritory is a place that cannot be possessed or territorized. It exists forever outside omnipresent power, which is also to say that it does not exist. Only places that do not exist can escape being possessed.
More radical scholars of cartography point out that extraterritoriality means a quality of being rather than an actual place. As such, any place can have extraterritoriality and can possibly become an extraterritory. The question is, is this extraterritoriality intrinsic to the place or is it imparted extrinsically through some methods of depiction? This controversy has been heatedly debated but remains unresolved, with both sides demonstrating equal strength in argument and eloquence. Those who hold the former view are dreamers of an idyllic world, who oppose human civilization and an anthropocentric culture of power; they fantasize that land could be only land and nothing more, and that the world should be left to living creatures. In contrast, the latter are cartocentric nihilists who believe in maps as the only reality, outside of which nothing exists. For them, everything on maps essentially acquires a kind of extraterritoreality. Through this interpretation, they challenge the power of territorialization, for in the irrevocable passage of time, maps are no longer tools of defining, depicting, and constructing territories, rather they have taken the place of territories themselves, in a mockery of the futility of the exertion of power. Different paths lead to the same goal.
8
BOUNDARY
If we take a careful look at the map for the lease of Kowloon (before it was formally ceded) that was attached to the Treaty of Tientsin in 1860, one or two thought-provoking points will naturally catch our attention regarding the straight line cutting across the northern part of the Kowloon Peninsula from east to west. In the east the line begins at Kowloon Fort, and in the west it ends at the northern point of Yeung Suen Chau (later called Ong Suen Chau, or “tossing boat island”). San-on County lies north of the line and to the south is the Kowloon Peninsula. Near the line are the words “This area is hilly wasteland.” If we suppose that maps are flat simulations of real places, then it follows that the really existing place, whether before or after the line was drawn, was basically unaffected. The hilly wasteland remained a hilly wasteland at the place where the straight line crosses it. This kind of line, which we name a boundary, is essentially different from other linear representations (for example, of coastlines or river systems) in mapmaking. In the eyes of traditional, science-oriented cartographers, the drawings of landforms always have their referents in reality, while boundaries exist only on maps. There is no actually existing entity that serves as evidence of boundaries between districts or countries. Therefore, we can say that the boundary is a fictional exercise of power.
We may ask, how do we know whether we have transgressed the boundary on a wide stretch of hilly wasteland without partitions or labels? How do we experience the feeling of crossing the boundary? How do we prevent transgression? Or how do we construct the crime of transgression? An invisible boundary is more powerful and ruthless than a natural geographical barrier in forcing a dissection of nondifferentiated space. Thus, when you stand on the north side of the boundary, you are inside San-on County and outside British Kowloon. But take a step forward and you will be inside British Kowloon and outside San-on County. To be inside a place means at the same time that you are outside other places, and vice versa. In other words, all outsides are a form of being inside and all insides are a form of being outside. There is no absolute inside, nor is there an absolute outside. From this perspective, the fixing of boundaries is a way of making a place a place. Since there is no place on earth that has an absolute existence, all places (or all human understanding of places) are areas within boundaries, and power interprets areas as territories with boundaries.
A boundary is not just not an imitation of the real world, it is actually a fictional molding of the real world. In the formulation and implementation of the boundary, the world copies the map. Objects like stones or fences that mark the boundary in the real world do not appear prior to the drawing of the line on the map, and maps are certainly not records of the prior existence of these objects. On the contrary, such labeling objects are imitations of the imaginary line on the map. Therefore, the boundary between Kowloon and San-on County exists in the first place on the map, and the world is transformed according to the blueprint. An excellent example of the world imitating a map is Boundary Street.2
The prerequisite for th
e setting of boundaries on maps is possession of the power to create fiction.
2 Boundary Street was a major street across the northern part of the Kowloon Peninsula. It was originally the boundary between British and Chinese territory as stipulated in the Convention of Beijing of 1860. However, a road was constructed along the boundary in the early twentieth century after the New Territories had been leased to the British and the boundary moved much farther north.
9
UTOPIA
If we open a traditional textbook on cartography and look up the section on map reading, we will find the following explanation: “Topographical map reading, or topographical map interpretation, is a method of gaining knowledge about the objective geographical environment through topographical maps. The process of map reading involves the reader recognizing signs on maps, thereby making the information received interact with the original spatial images registered by the cognitive faculties of the cerebrum, and in so doing transforming the reading of signs into knowledge of the geographical environment.”
However, for a map reader like you or me, the ultimate aim of reading a map is no longer knowledge of the actual geographical environment. With the increase in knowledge of the geographical environment held by human civilization, there is no longer any place on the surface of the earth left unknown, so that the sense of amazement and exultation in discovering virgin lands in the great age of navigation is a blessing that our age is forever denied. Our age is crammed with so much knowledge that no space for the imagination is left. In the foreseeable future, the totality of all scientifically produced maps will allow us to know all knowable land on the surface of the earth. There is only one place that is forever beyond the reach of our knowledge: the entrance to the land of the Peach Blossom Spring.
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