In a South American myth, the cedar tree is a treasure chest full of words. People are supposed to make an opening in its trunk and listen to the words concealed inside it. Those who can hear them will find the place where they belong; those who cannot hear them will drift like dust in the breeze.
PART FOUR
Signs
42
THE DECLINE OF THE LEGEND
In China, one of the earliest maps to use legends systematically is the Ming dynasty “Grand World Map,” published by Luo Hongxian (1504–1564) in 1555. The “Grand World Map” was Luo Hongxian’s revised and enlarged version of the Yuan magnum opus “World Map” by Zhu Siben (1273–1337). Its legend divides urban areas into three levels, using white squares to show cities at the prefectural level, white lozenges for the district level, and white circles for the county level. It also uses white triangles for military post stations and black squares for transport stations and so on. In addition, units such as state farms, forts, walled cities, defiles, regimental camps, postal relay stations, frontier passes, border garrisons, beacon mounds, terraces, pacification offices, pacification commissions, military commissions, and chieftain’s offices are distinguished by geometrical signs of different shapes. Setting up legends like these allowed a range of distinctions, lacking in the earlier version, to be made for significant features of the landscape. You could even say that legend signs enriched the vocabulary of maps and made their grammar more complex. Legends are the inevitable product of a constant development in map language.
Nevertheless, it would be inadvisable to regard legends as a purely passive outcome in the history of cartography. In fact, the appearance of legends automatically transformed the basic character of maps, adding a narrative aspect to the pictorial aspect. The modern use of the word “legend” includes all explanatory wording in images, maps, and illustrations. Therefore a legend is a place where images and writing converge and interact, a glossary of two languages. As a script it gives a semantic structure to qualitative or quantitative signs that are basically without an inherent meaning: for instance, the relationship between the three levels of prefectural, district, and county cities, allowing the juxtaposition of synchronic signs to produce a diachronic narrative connection, such as outlining the potentiality of itineraries along navigable rivers or passable roads. In the end, legends allow maps to tell stories.
We can imagine what kind of legends tell what kind of stories. Legends about walled cities, border forts, and garrisons tell a story of military attacks and defense; legends about post stations, roads, and circuits tell stories of mothers parted from sons and husbands from wives; legends about ports, shipping lanes, and blue water tell stories of danger, conquests, and roaming. The design of representational signs in legends observes the principle of generalization; the requirement of symbolization conversely belongs to a secondary category, because the nature of signs is by no means mimetic but indicative. Therefore the relationship between signs and writing is arbitrary, and conversion from one to the other is extremely flexible. In theory, legends conceal a huge imaginative range; we can use any kind of sign to show a written concept, and we can use any kind of method, simple or complicated, to divide or unify the geographical elements to be expressed, or use any kind of image, whether close or distant, to weave together the semantic and syntactic morphemes. Different ways of using legends can turn a map into open-ended polysemic fiction offering innumerable stories: amazing and anodyne, happy and tragic, tracing routes from south to north and west to east, traversing longitudes and latitudes, winding around hills and rivers, following post roads and railways, crossing fields and deserts, passing mountains and lakes, and penetrating forests and valleys.
However, as legends developed, not only did they fail to expand the possibility of signs as a form of language; on the contrary, they turned into a limitation. To serve their instrumental purpose more efficiently, legends became uniform, compulsory supplements without any imaginative power to speak of. The language of maps became rigid. There was nothing in existence more arid than maps, which were reduced to games in the exercise of power, whether in regard to knowledge, economics, or politics. It is only when individual ways of reading legends return that we can again read legends as tales of marvels.
43
THE EYE OF THE TYPHOON
“Hong Kong Buying from the World,” published by the Hong Kong Survey and Mapping Office in 1987, generated a fairly intense dispute among economist and climatologist map readers. It is a world map of the five continents, whose most prominent feature is its broad arrow lines that stretch from every country across the world, pointing in beautiful shades of purple toward an all but invisible city off the coast of the South China Sea. These complex arrows are vectors indicating by means of gradations in width and hue the quality and direction of the flow of commodities. The tail of the arrow from Europe, for example, is divided into seven sections, like streamers at the end of a banner, or the tail feathers of a cock pheasant; the lines from Africa, India, Australia, and Southeast Asia are like flames from an explosion flaring in all directions, or like a hundred rivers converging; the lines from South and North America are like the long tongues of snakes or lizards; the line from Japan sweeps down like a gale-force wind; the line from mainland China is like a gigantic finger pressing on the island’s head. A box in the upper-left corner explains that it is a pictorial record of Hong Kong’s imports from abroad in the period January to December 1985; the total value of the goods, given in billions of Hong Kong dollars, is printed at the top of each arrowhead. For instance, the figure 28.9 appears beside the arrow from Europe, 24.6 beside the arrow from the Americas, 53.3 from Japan, and 59 from mainland China. Tables in the lower half give breakdowns of imports according to transportation routes, the increase in the value of imports from each major country within the last decade, and the value of each category of goods and its growth.
From the economists’ point of view, this map constructs a pattern of local economic existence indexed by imports, setting out the broad outlines of Hong Kong’s import activities (without losing the details) by utilizing a rich and abundant range of images (such as graphs of arrowheads and means of transport), and a number of visually informative tables (such as three-dimensional pie charts and column charts). It could also be said that although falling short of truly scientific cartography in terms of its basic construction and value, this map still matches up to highly precise geomorphologic maps with respect to its location’s material existence. In a certain sense, it even surpasses large-scale survey maps, because it can capture the actual physiognomy of the location without recourse to drawing an image of it; compared with the actual earth’s surface at that location, it can abstract a more material essence and dispense with the need for any depiction of the location itself. It is even impossible to draw the location itself, because in a small-scale map (i.e., a microscopic version of the macrocosm), this location actually lacks the plasticity of cartography. To expand into a world-shaking cyclone, forcing the projection of its own image on the global stage, this location is wholly dependent on the value that it absorbs—value in the literal sense. It then becomes the equivalent to what it has absorbed, neither more nor less.
Specialist climatologists reading this map, however, had a completely different way of looking at it. They believed that this map depicts a large-scale global climate change in 1985, together with the major typhoon that was caused by this change. High pressure over the five continents had the effect that air currents happened to converge over this small island off the coast of the South China Sea, forming a violent cyclone across the whole island. According to the records, this global cyclone strengthened without abating over the next ten years and showed signs of persistent duration. As the force of the cyclone increased so did the destruction it created in equal measure. There was calm at the heart of the cyclone, however, because it was empty.
Semiologist map readers, adopting the climatologists’ analysis, conclud
ed that this map explains the islanders’ field of vision.
44
CHEK LAP KOK AIRPORT
The secret of the Chek Lap Kok Airport plan is now beyond the reach of anyone to uncover. The only clue that remains to us is a blueprint drawn up in 1990 of Hong Kong’s seaport and airport development, called “Construction for the Future.” This blueprint, which displays the development of port facilities in Hong Kong at the end of the twentieth century, includes sea-lane plans, container wharves expansion, and harbor reclamation projects. It also outlines the so-called new airport plan in documents and records, that is, the enormous concept that begins with the new Chek Lap Kok location of the airport on the north shore of Lantao Island and includes a range of developments such as the airport railway and residential, industrial, and commercial sites along the shoreline. It is worth pointing out that this blueprint emphasizes the importance of Hong Kong as a seaport and airport, by hinting at its two possible exits—by sea and by air.
Some people think, however, that the section on seaport construction in this “Construction for the Future” blueprint was only camouflage, its main purpose being a strategy for airport development. What was the ultimate point of this strategy? The superficial explanation is that the old Kai Tak Airport in the city center was already bursting at the seams, and since it had no way of meeting the needs of the city’s continuously expanding volume of air traffic, the only option was to build a new international airport. However, to the sharp eyes of scholars of strategic cartography, there was an ulterior scheme behind the construction of a new airport: what was being planned was by no means an airport in the traditional sense but a mobile airport. Their guess was that the plan for the airport was at the heart of an emergency contingency strategy. The point of this strategy was to cope with major catastrophes such as nuclear accidents, earthquakes, epidemics, or alien invasions. The original concept was to separate a section of the surface of Hong Kong Island from the earth’s crust and install a huge propeller on it, converting it into a mobile port, but this plan was later abandoned because the size of the project made it unfeasible. Mobility had all along been the central concept in the contingency strategy, because in a city that lacked the ability to defend itself in every respect, escape was the only way out in the event of disaster.
Where the airport in question was constructed on new land reclaimed from the harbor, the prospect of mobility was obviously quite close to reality. The expression “airport” actually means “a port in the air.” The “Construction for the Future” blueprint had a drawing next to the site of the airport at Chek Lap Kok of a three-dimensional schematic diagram of an airport rising to a flight path in the sky. In the lower left-hand corner of the map was a predicative table, showing that the capacity of the airport could reach forty million passengers by 2008, that is, six times the population of the territory. Given ideal conditions in the railway transportation system from the city to the airport, it was estimated that the total population could reach Chek Lap Kok airport in safety within three hours of an incident taking place and be aboard the airport after a further two hours as it moved away from the mainland. The airport’s flight and landing technology, its range and speed, and conflicts related to its movement in regard to airspace, land borders, and territorial waters were details that are so far unknown. No one even knows whether or not the airport in the end ever actually became airborne.
45
THE METONYMIC SPECTRUM
Reading a map of land use in Hong Kong drawn up in 1987 can help us gain a deeper understanding of the metonymic possibilities allowed by color distribution. From the explanation given in the map legend, we learn that the separate land uses represented by different colors were as follows: red for commercial districts; orange for public housing estates; dark brown for high-density residential districts; light brown for low-density residential districts; purple for industrial districts; blue for government and communal public facilities (including schools, hospitals, and communications facilities); green for entertainment and recreational areas; yellow for cemeteries and crematoria; white for vacant land or areas under development. On this map, red is concentrated mainly in the area bordered by Nathan Road from Mong Kok to Tsim Sha Tsui in the Kowloon Peninsula and Central District in Hong Kong Island; there is a scattering of orange in the northern part of the Kowloon Peninsula; dark brown occupies the widest swath, spreading all over Kowloon and the north shore of Hong Kong Island; concentrations of light brown can be found only at Kowloon Tong in the north of Kowloon, along with the Peak and Jardine’s Lookout on Hong Kong Island; purple patches are rather few, scattered around the Cheung Sha Wan and Tai Kok Tsui in West Kowloon and San Po Kong and Kwun Tong in East Kowloon, along with Quarry Bay in the eastern district of Hong Kong Island; blue is particularly striking, occupying key locations in every district; green is dotted sparsely among them; yellow occurs in isolated patches along the northern boundaries of urban Kowloon and in Happy Valley on the southern edge of Hong Kong Island’s urban area; white is mainly along the constantly changing shorelines.
In land-use maps we see the formation of a city’s genealogy. One aspect of color differentiation is that it gives prominence to shifts in usage, but at the same time it emphasizes a kind of nonexistent and highly generalized, simplified, and purified division. Also, colors do not have any necessary intrinsic significance. Meaning can be shown by a color through its difference from other colors, and associated meanings can be conveyed by different densities or shades of the same color. Thus, just as orange turns into red, red becomes purple, purple becomes blue, blue becomes green, and green becomes yellow in a repeating cycle, the city through color both diverges and converges, separates and joins, is different and the same. (This is apart from the blank spaces without color.)
Nevertheless, the color spectrum does not actually have an independent existence; when the seven colors are overlaid, does it not amount to an apparently nonexistent white? If this is the case, white is the agglomeration of all colors, nothingness is the accumulation of things, and uselessness is the basis and ultimate end of usefulness. Further, if color is an aspect of appearance, we should be able to read other senses as well. Take hearing: red is a declaration of love; orange is the scream of a rape victim; dark brown is a sentimental announcement by the host on a TV show with on-the-spot reporting; light brown is belching, snoring, or barking; purple is the expiring moment of machinery in operation; blue is the MTR’s “Please stand behind the yellow line” announcement; green is a furtive whisper; yellow is a mobile phone that no one answers; white is the sound of nature. This would be how color constructs a map of a city’s sound zones. Or take smells: red is bacteria in a central air-conditioning system; orange is severed limbs in a refrigerator; dark brown is toilet disinfectant in the neighbors’ bathroom; light brown is fermenting grapes in backyard dust bins; purple is congealed grease and sweat; blue is moldy wooden tables and chairs in government offices; green is the body odor of a young woman dressed in fashionable brand-name clothes; yellow is the twice-a-year scent of graveside flowers and dense smoke from hillside fires; white is pure dust. This would be how color constructs a map of urban odor zones. In principle, no matter what kind of imagery you invent in which the part stands for the whole, you can rationalize it through the design of a map legend.
In the distribution of similar colors, the combination of these three factors (usage, sound, and smell) creates several layers of metonyms, constituting another framework spectrum/genealogy: from matter to sense organs to states of mind. From this it is not hard to imagine a map of urban moods, recording the symptoms of a city’s collective schizophrenia (such as hypocrisy, frenzy, apathy, disgust, boredom, submissiveness, restlessness, insomnia, and amnesia), and assembling patches of red, orange, dark brown, light brown, purple, blue, green, yellow, and white to compose a flourishing cityscape of dazzling diversity. What a map that is so rich in sensory stimulation requires is a way of reading the senses. This taking a part for the
whole is a necessity for metonym, the basic nature of senses, and the stirring of desire.
46
THE ELEVATION OF IMAGINATION
From the development of elevation topography in the Hong Kong region, we can understand clearly how a place might not be willing to accept the limitations of flat surfaces, pulling away from the mediocrity that cannot permit height. What is meant by elevation is the vertical distance along a vertical line from the standard level of the earth, also known as height above sea level or true height; and what is meant by that level is the mean sea level. In other words, elevation means transcending the level.
Prior to the map in the 1819 San-on County Gazetteer, the maps of the Hong Kong region produced in China still adopted the method of panoramic landscape maps, in which height is shown by a hill-shaped schematic image. On the one hand, this highly symbolic method is easy for people who are familiar with this pictorial tradition to interpret; on the other hand, it is a complete submission to the fact that maps are flat, pressing what is seen from the side as a three-dimensional hill shape into a flat surface as seen from above looking down. It could also be said that the hill shapes in the landscape method are only generalized qualitative signs and not quantitative signs calculated on the basis of actual data; they could even be called the shape of hills but not their reality. The mood invoked by this kind of map is dignified with fine-sounding epithets such as “secluded elegance,” but in reality it is more a matter of lethargy and indolence, lacking the will to emerge beyond secondary space.
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