Dr Sunkyu Lee will present her paper titled Masonry Walls as Irregulars: Security Crises and Cartographic Responses in Sixteenth-Seventeenth Century Shanxi at the Annual Conference of the Association for Asian Studies in Seattle.
This paper traces evolving cartographic practices in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century Shanxi in documenting the changing materiality and physicality of walled compounds—specifically, the growing use of bricks as building materials. During this period, increasing geopolitical and local security crises along with a growing availability of new building materials and firearm techniques promoted changes in military forts and city walls of Shanxi. Many of them were changed from rammed earth to a masonry wall using bricks and stones at least to cover existing rammed earth to enhance defense capacity. Although existing studies trace such transformations from the perspectives of technology, architecture, and intellectual history, few studies pay attention to how the contemporaneous visual sources both documented and facilitated such changes. My examination of defense manuals, printed gazetteers, and painted military atlases aims to illustrate how mapmakers and painters adopted different techniques and visualizing strategies to document such changes. By using a new digital image annotation tool called IM-Markus, I explore the intricated relations between material and cartographic transformation across different cartographic media and genres.