No country in the world, considering its size, importance and population, is so inefficiently mapped as China. China takes great credit to herself for her age-long "civilisation," her ancient learning and the scholastic attainments of her literati, but with it all such a mundane necessity as cartography appears to have been entirely overlooked.
Yoe writer has struggled with Chinese maps, both of ancient and modern lineage, to his sorrow, and has found them all sadly wanling, lace Dames Unere are abundance it 1s true; but exactitude in location, and the indica-non Ao, iuountalMs, rivers, and contours 1s markedly absent in almost all. All of which, by the way, 1 one of the best safeguards the bandits in China have, for were the country, surveyed and mapped a tenth as well as India is—a country of barbarians to the Chinese—banditism would be a more difficult occupation.
An event, therefore, is the publication of a new map of China. True, it is on a scale of one in one-and-a-half million, but so are almost all the maps we have yet seen. The British Ordnance Survey maps, of which there are but a few only, are the only maps we know of that can boast of a scale that is of value to the traveller in the interior, but this new map, bearing the well-known imprint of Phillips, will be a very welcome addition to those now existing.
(he map, which has been edited by Sir Alexander Hosie, m.a., Li. D., F-R.G.s., who will be remembered as one of the most brilliant of Britain's consuls-general in China, and who is the author of a work on Szechuan, is very attractively produced and is in marked contrast to the map work one sees to-day bearing the imprints of China's printers. Its extent is most noticeable, for it embraces Vladivostok-on the east, the limits of Kansu on the west, the whole of Manchuria on the north and the island of Hainan on the south. The feature of the map is in its commercial value; it is indexed with 98 distinctive sym-bois to indicate the animal, vegetable and mineral products and the various manufactures of the country, in addition to which full, well selected and distinct tive colours show the railways in operation and under construction, the navigable rivers, with limits of navigation both for large small steamers and junks; canals, steamer routes, caravan routes and all the usual information contained in a good map.
This, we believe. is the first map to be published with the new Republican form of nomenclature. Both this and the older and more familiar forms appear together, while the spellings throughout are those officially adopted by the Chinese Post Office and so often disregarded in maps of China. The scale is in kilometres, Chinese li and miles.
A very valuable adjunct to the mzp is a handbook containing 16 pages of geographical and other information and well indexed, so that the work of tracing a place on the map itself is a matter of a moment or two only. The size of the map is 62" by 45" and the scale 48 miles to an inch; although a small scale for such a thickly populated country as China it enables a cartographer to show all the moderately sized towns in the empire. Inset in the margin of the map are subsidiary maps of the province of Sinkiang, the Peking-Tsinan district and the Shanghai-Nanking district, the two latter on a comparatively large scale.
Philips, London, are the publishers: Kelly & Walsh the local distributors of the map, which is obtainable either in stiff covers, folded, or for hanging on the wall
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.