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How Did Early Chinese Mapmakers Balance Measurement and Meaning? - The Problem of Inconsistent Maps in the Jin Dynasty | Sleepy Facts About History
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In the third century CE, a Chinese official named Pei Xiu confronted an empire's worth of maps that could not agree with one another. The same roads had different distances, and river courses diverged across regional records. His solution was a set of six principles for judging maps by measurable relationships rather than by the authority of the mapmaker or the institution that produced them. This episode examines those principles, the administrative problems of the early Jin dynasty that…
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