For years I was aware of the existence, somewhere there, of ‘a map of the Great Wall’ of considerable length. I first saw a rather murky photocopied image, credited ‘Collection of the Lateran Museum, Rome’. Following up, I located the one and only paper written about the map, authored by M. J. Meijer in 1956. In his introduction he noted that in 1952 the map had been seen by Leo Bagrow, founder of the cartography journal Imago Mundi; according to him, the map had been ‘taken to the Vatican for photographing and attempts to locate it since have failed’. The Lateran Museum was dissolved in 1970, its contents absorbed by the Vatican Galleries and Museums, one part of which was the Missionary Ethnography Museum.
After my enquiries had failed to prompt any response, I took a shot in the dark and visited Rome. This, I felt, was the only way to make headway in the longstanding mystery over the map’s where-abouts. However, my visit could not have been more badly timed: it was on loan to a museum in California, as part of the first ever group of Vatican antiquities to travel overseas. I salvaged what I could from my visit, managing a brief meeting with a curator, the aptly named Father Mapelli (which I thought surely must augur well). He did warn, however, that ‘doing things in the Vatican is very difficult, very complicated and very slow’.
I returned to Beijing, and the map eventually returned to Rome. But I failed to get any response to my follow-up enquiries, addressed to the museum’s director and to its principal researcher in Chinese antiquities. My last remaining working contact was the manager of the photo archive at the Vatican, and she provided around twenty low-resolution images of the map, allowing me to at least engage in some ‘closer’ distance learning. Stunned by the map’s colour and its charming details, I was inspired to return to Meijer’s paper.
This time I focused on the photostats of the map, included as an appendix to the paper. With the aid of a magnifying glass I studied the disordered strips. There were some long overlaps, and I slowly worked out which sections could be cut out and how a reproduction of the whole map might be spliced together. My work succeeded, and I now had a near-perfect scaled-down research copy of the original seven-metre-plus map. From end to end on the table of my Beijing study, my reproduction measured 1.62 metres. I could bring the ‘Borgia Great Wall Scroll’ back home.
In October 2014, as I was tidying up this book’s manuscript and preparing to submit it to my editor, I had to decide what to do about this problematic leftover. Thinking of a possible winter break in Rome, a finale to wrap up the project, I searched online to check that the map was back on public display. The top find was new, and pointed me towards the ‘Patrons of the Arts at the Vatican Museum’ website, a portal which promotes the endeavours of this organisation to financially assist the Vatican Museum in the restoration of its antiquities. Listed among the projects requiring support in 2015 was none other than the Borgia Great Wall Scroll. It required cleaning, repairing and photographing, and the patrons were seeking approximately US$25 000 to fund the work.
I saw a chance for International Friends of the Great Wall to get involved and fund the restoration, so I contacted the patrons to make a proposal. I had established International Friends to organise contributions to the conservation of the Great Wall. The society had pioneered and sustained the campaign against garbage on the Wall, had the Great Wall landscape listed by the World Monuments Fund as an endangered site, and created and curated the influential conservation-research project that used rephotography to evidence changes that had befallen the Wall. Funding the map’s repair would be a new kind of Great Wall ‘conservation’ work, and presented a special opportunity for a cultural connection between two states. I pitched the opportunity to a philanthropic Chinese friend and Great Wall advocate, and a few days later he confirmed the willingness of a select group of friends to donate, which would enable International Friends of the Great Wall to fund the restoration.
I contacted the patrons with the good news, and a few hours later received their response: an international patrons chapter had, just a few hours earlier, already pledged their support! We had been pipped at the post. The perfect conclusion had eluded me, and a chance to establish a shared interest in the Great Wall between Chinese people and the Vatican had been lost.
But our failure also means that my journey is not over. It reminds me that the best journeys never reach a definite end, and I will continue, with ears and eyes open, to search for more insights into the Great Wall story.
In the meantime, as an encore to The Great Wall in 50 Objects, I am thrilled to present what I have learned about this object, studied through what may be described as intelligence sources: a homemade, scaled-down edition of the map which presents a rarely seen panorama of the Great Wall in the most surprising, and inaccessible, of places.
51.
Italian Journey
The Borgia Great Wall scroll
To appreciate how distinguished this panoramic pictorial map really is, one needs to proceed along its whole length. As a scroll, it might be unrolled and rolled to reveal a series of overlapping views, but it’s better still to unfurl it and slowly reveal it from end to end. My copy measures 1.62 metres.
Although it bears no title, no chop, no date, no preface and no author’s name, this map seems to identify itself readily: along its whole length we see a continuous linear fortification. Strung out beside it are some prominent geographical features – mountains and rivers. These seem vaguely familiar yet strangely disorienting, until one spots a tiny character 北, or north, at the map’s bottom edge. This immediately clears the confusion: the map is an upside down view looking south, not north. It’s now apparent that the Hexi Corridor occupies the map’s far right (west), that the Yellow River arcs through its central area, and that the Shanxi region is on the left (east). This coverage reinforces that the spinal-cord structure throughout is the Ming Great Wall – or at least three-quarters of it. And it seems to follow that the map is of Ming age.
This map really takes you there – panoramically, lengthwise – while the twenty or so images provide magnified snapshots of its colourful detail. Its narrowness contrasts with its length, further emphasising its focus. Most maps show us a view of the ground seen from above, and this one does too. The panorama we see has an aerial feel, as if we are flying across North China’s predominantly arid, ochre-yellow lands following this remarkable landmark. Whenever we look down we can see the Wall.
For presentation purposes, the map’s maker has simplified our flightpath, straightening out the Wall’s twists and turns. To do so, he’s broken some cartographic rules. The map’s scale is irregular, and it’s most inaccurate east of the Yellow River. What we have is a unique strip map of the Great Wall, a special geographical product with pros and cons, made by science and artistic licence, compressed and stretched and straightened, ‘sketchy’ in style.
Just like a conventional map, though, it has room for all kinds of information – whatever was of interest to its maker. Inside the Wall we see a procession of rectangular military installations – forts. On the outside, tiny drawings painted in bright colours provide glimpses of life there: nomads ride between tented camps, horses and camels graze, carcasses of meat dry in the wind, and the positions of wells for watering livestock are marked. In one place we see men sitting on rugs, at another women are dancing. These scenes are a far cry from the stereotyped, derogatory and Sinocentric views of the border region that we have seen previously. This is a two-sided perspective, showing not so much a cultural collision, but an interface. It conveys a change in tone.
On earlier Great Wall maps the nomads received short shrift, labelled yi (‘barbarians’) on the milestone Huayi Tu, or ‘Map of China and the Barbarian Lands’, of the ninth century (Object 13). On the sixteenth century Jiubian Tu, or ‘Map of the Nine Border Regions’ (Object 37), they were described as living like animals in ‘nests’ or chaoxue (‘lairs’). This map’s language and pictures are more objective, more informative, showing a tentative peace. Hierarchies of off
icers are deployed to command sizable garrisons of troops at the forts, which are clearly ready for action if needed.
On the other side we can see some new-style encampments, where gers, or felt-walled tents, are pitched alongside, sometimes even inside, walled enclosures. The arrangement suggests that some nomadic tribes have not only benefited materially from frontier trade, but have also started to live a new life, part-nomadic and part-settled. The drawings make me think of the world’s largest camp, composed of tens of thousands of white gers which, for better or worse, have been pitched by herders migrating to cluster around the built-up city-centre of today’s Ulaanbaatar, capital of Mongolia. Back on our map, we can regard the lifestyle change as a new chapter of the Great Wall’s story, a new phase of regional relations.
As well as its pictorial details, the map appears to bear large numbers of labels. They are rather like Post-it notes, not part of the map proper but made of paper and attached by users. This method would have been useful for recording information that was subject to change, such as the populations of barracks or the latest news concerning the shifting camp grounds of nomadic tribes. In Su-chou (modern name Jiuquan), for example, a label tells us that 3 000 troops are deployed there under the command of a brigadier, several majors, captains and other officers. Throughout the Hexi Corridor, the figures on the labels add up to show that this is the most heavily fortified area on the entire map, with about 25 000 men deployed in forts located in the lee of the Wall.
Outside the Wall there’s one very revealing annotation: ‘Outside the pass of Poluokou are the Tianba barbarians, who are under Galdan Khan’s control.’ It’s this name – Galdan Borshigt Khan – that gives us a definite date range for the age of the map. Born in 1644, Galdan Khan in 1670 became ruler of the Zunghars (or Western Mongols), who occupied land to the west of Qing China, roughly the area of today’s Xinjiang region; they controlled it until 1697.
DESCRIPTION: The Borgia Great Wall scroll, a painted silk strip map measuring 7.75 metres by thirty-eight centimetres and showing the Great Wall from Jiayuguan to Datong
SIGNIFICANCE: The most extensive elongate map of the Great Wall
ORIGIN: Qing Kangxi period, circa 1695; it was acquired by Jesuits post-1700, taken to Rome and eventually collected by Cardinal Stefano Borgia in his house-museum at Velletri
LOCATION: Vatican Ethnological Museum, Vatican Museums and Galleries
What purported to be a military map of the Great Wall, showing the fortification’s relationship with forts in its immediate hinterland, now reveals itself to have been made during the overlordship of Galdan Borshigt Khan, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century – half a century or so after the fall of the Ming. The Kangxi Emperor (1654–1722) had by then abandoned any idea of maintaining the inherited Ming Wall. What, then, was the status of the Great Wall depicted on this map at that time, circa 1670 to 1697? What was its purpose, and who might have used it?
Referring to a petition delivered in 1691 to the Ministry of Works requesting funds for repair work on the Wall at Gubeikou, the Kangxi Emperor dismissed the structure as historically ineffective. Passing through the very location en route to his summer resort at Chengde, he made known his preferred policy of border security: ‘by conferring favours on the Khalkha [Northern] Mongols, our dynasty prevailed on those tribes to take over the defence of the northern border [in the far north-east, against the Russians], and they are more impregnable than the Great Wall.’
In light of the reference to Galdan Khan (which is repeated elsewhere on the map), we must acknowledge that this cannot be a map of the Great Wall per se. Rather, it’s a map that incorporates the Great Wall as a landscape feature in an area where the Qing thought it prudent to monitor Galdan Khan’s activities. The Wall’s towers were long empty of guards, and the ramparts were crumbling; it was now a ‘ghost Wall’, abandoned yet still very visible. But it also surely functioned as a road to follow, a highway leading westward.
Covering the interior three-quarters of the complete west–east extent of the Ming Wall, this map focuses on that part of the old frontier that was least known to the new Manchu rulers. They were accustomed to Manchuria’s forests, valleys, mountains and plains, while the Yellow Earth plateau and desert terrain of China’s north-west were alien to them. The coverage of this map, and its increasing accuracy westwards, points to its usefulness as a guide to logistics and defence planning in the region.
Surprisingly, though, it bears no Manchu script, which until the late Qing was the sole national script for imperial documents. One explanation may be that as most Qing banner strength was preoccupied in defeating the so-called ‘Revolts of the Three Feudatories’, which raged across the southern provinces between 1673 and 1681, the task of north-western defence remained largely the responsibility of the standing Chinese army there, part of the so-called ‘Green Battalion’ of ethnic Hans. We can assume that because the map is only in Chinese script, it was used by officers of that battalion, or by Chinese officials in the Board of War.
Galdan’s Zungharia, the last steppe empire, stretched across Central Asia’s steppe, mountain and desert lands, covering a huge expanse of territory between the western end of the Great Wall and today’s Kazakhstan. Eager for resources, Galdan attempted to expand east and annex the Mongolian Steppe, a move which threatened Qing alliances in the region. In 1696 Kangxi personally led the campaign against the Zunghars, with the decisive battle being fought at Zuunmod, east of Ulaanbaatar. This determined Qing offensive, which drove Galdan to suicide the following year, is considered to have been Kangxi’s finest military achievement. The victory checked the Zunghar expansion and brought much of today’s Mongolia and some of Zungharia as far west as Hami into Kangxi’s expanding empire.
The Ming Wall, once a frontier, now lay within a much larger Qing China, making it redundant. In the meantime, this nameless map, which conceals the Qing’s adept political gaming across a cultural interface, was set to be involved in a different meeting of cultures. In due course it would in fact be given a foreign name.
Visually, this map is one of the most fascinating in our series. In the sub-category of maps, it has charismatic qualities of not only being large and long, but informative and surprising. With its misleading focus – and its extreme rarity, as one of only a handful of relevant Great Wall maps – I found it to be the least researched and known, having been studied previously only by cartography expert M. J. Meijer in 1956. And certainly it resides in a most unexpected place: Vatican City, whose tiny 0.44 square kilometres in the centre of Rome hosts the Vatican Museum and Galleries, and which therefore boasts the highest density of antiquities and artworks anywhere in the world.
The map is now known as the Borgia Great Wall Scroll, after its owner, Cardinal Stefano Borgia (1731–1804), whose fascination for antiquities was inspired by the Roman Emperor Octavian (63 BC–AD 14), who ‘adorned his residences with things most precious for their antiquity and rarity’. The cardinal’s collecting passion transformed his ancestral Palazzo Borgia in the hill town of Velletri into ‘a house that contained the world’s treasures’. The contents of its rooms were said to succinctly testify to a universal and encyclopedic culture, and he eagerly opened his doors to scholars of all creeds and nationalities. The Palazzo Borgia had few peers in Europe in its time. Among the prominent visitors was the German poet Goethe, who mentioned the collection in his classic diary compilation Italian Journey.
The scroll, too, had made an Italian journey of note. The Vatican was bequeathed most of Cardinal Borgia’s collection after his death in 1804. But how had he acquired it? Borgia was well connected, as a renowned collector-curator, and well placed as secretary of the Sacra Congregatio de Propaganda Fide, the papal office responsible for acquiring antiquities brought back to Rome by the order’s missionaries. It is likely that a Jesuit had acquired the map, for they alone cultivated high-level imperial government relations in China, and it must have been after a kind of declassification, following Galda
n Khan’s death in 1697. In 1708 Kangxi commissioned a Jesuit team to map the Great Wall region (see Object 43), an event that probably post-dates the acquisition of the Borgia Scroll. This means the most likely time the map travelled to Italy was around 1705, which was within a decade or so of its creation.
In the Vatican, on the other side of the world, the scroll would enjoy a fitting finale, exhibited under the same roof, in the same museum, and just a short stroll from the divine paintings and sculptures by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci. They and their works contrast poignantly with this painting and its creators, a cartographic representation of the world’s largest construction, made by masses of unknown artisans.
The Great Wall as featured on the China map in Ortelius’ world atlas, Object 1
Rubbing from a bronze mirror showing cavalry, Object 7
Silver funerary mask of a Qidan nobleman, Object 20
Batmunkh, a traditional Mongolian bowmaker, draws a bow of his own making, Object 8
Young Mongolian riders learn to balance themselves on horseback with the aid of stirrups, Object 10
First five panels of Meng Jiangnü’s Endless Search for her Husband woodcut print, Object 2 (British Library Board OR 5896)
Close up of ‘Presenting Horses’ scroll painting on silk, Object 31
Detail of a trident tip from a spirit banner, Object 23
Close up of a mujian or wooden border document bearing signaling instructions, Object 15
Silk painting of the Ming Dynasty Imperial City, Object 27
Great Wall in 50 Objects Page 28