South Ming Dynasty Detailed Knowledge Of Geography

Ming Dynasty is a special period in the history of China. Geography is an epitome in the age. In the past, Academic circles didn’t pay attention to the development of oversea geography in Ming dynasty. This article choose South Asia as investigative object, making use of ancient scripts and cartes. I want to discuss two issue:geographic knowledge of South Asia and missionaries incoming new geographic knowledge.Firstly, by analyzing these written records, this paper considers geographical knowledge not much progress is largely in understanding their predecessors followed. Secondly, from the Ming Dynasty retained numerous maps, locate part of the map depicting the South Asian region, and which reflected the geographic information, while those with a text description of geographic information to compare, analyze the similarities and differences. Through this study, this paper argues Ming painted map and text description have different sources of knowledge, contacts between the two are not close, Finally, the East and from the late Ming to the missionary perspective, South Asia geographical information they passed was discussed, missionaries incoming geographic knowledge can be divided into two parts of the text and maps, especially geography pictured heavy, through the analysis of these so-called knowledge, as well as the late Ming scholars respond to these new knowledge, I believe that the incoming missionaries at the time in the world in terms of knowledge, but in addition to very small part of the enlightened scholar, inventor and the vast majority did not accept this knowledge, but continue to be attacked.In summary, whether it is from the Ming text description, or from the map to draw on geographical knowledge in South Asia are not too many places beyond their predecessors, even in some areas of knowledge as well as backward. In the background of western learning spreading to the east, Chinese of Ming Dynasty also foiled to seize the opportunity and absorb new knowledge of geography actively, changing stagnant or even wrong understanding. Therefore, we should take an objective attitude to evaluate the extraterritorial knowledge of Ming Dynasty.