The Communist Party of China (CPC) prides itself for mandating its cadres to be truthful in their reporting to enable higher organs to resolve problems and pinpoint the causes of nagging issues that deter progress on the ideological, political and organizational fronts.
Yet, China has not been truthful about its claims in the West Philippine Sea (WPS) and the rest of the South China Sea (SCS), where it nauseatingly insists that it has “indisputable” sovereignty over the Spratlys and the Scarborough Shoal, which is within the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of the Philippines and located more than 1,000 kilometers from Hainan.
Beijing’s claims rest upon Ming Dynasty map as the Ricci-Li map, which was drawn up in 1602 by Italian Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and the Chinese geographer Li Wocun to show the expanse of the imperial territory. Li was responsible for the data points on the Ming territories while Ricci drew up the map of the rest of the world. Palace courtiers and scholars were not happy that the map showed the Ming dynasty controlled only a small part of the world but the emperor himself liked the cartographic work that he ordered 12 copies of it.
Writing for the Taipei Times eight years ago, John K. Tkakic reported that copies of the same map at the University of Minnesota and the US Library of Congress showed a bizarre alteration of a significant caption of the map. Entitled “Comprehensive Chart of the Myriad Lands upon the Foundation of the Earth,” the map, Tkakic said, “depicted a world 20 times more expansive than the emperor had ever imagined. It bore over 850 place names and minutely scripted legends for each kingdom, island and continent. It featured latitude and longitude lines identifying their locations on the spherical Earth.”
In the map quadrant covering what is now the South China Sea was the legend: “The Great Ming is renowned for the richness of its civilization. It comprises all between the 15th and 42nd parallels. The other tributary realms of the four seas are very numerous.” This legend is conspicuously missing from both the University of Minnesota map acquired from British antiquarian David Crouch in 2009, who bought it from a Japanese collector who claimed to have owned it for 35 years.
A copy displayed by the US Library of Congress in 2010 also had the same erasure, with ocean features painted over the caption. The phrase “between the 15th and 42nd parallels” was deleted since it limited Ming territory between the 15th and 42nd parallels and rendered illegitimate any Chinese claim in the 12th parallel, where the Spratlys Islands are located.
The erasure could have been done to obliterate evidence that China’s historical primacy in the South China Sea is a modern fiction, Tkakic theorized. The mystery is that only the University of Minnesota and US Library of Congress copies of the Ricci-Li maps contained the erasures and both of them could have been sourced from China. However, copies of the Ricci-Li map in Europe, South Korea and Japan were intact and contained the legend: “The Great Ming is renowned for the richness of its civilization. It comprises all between the 15th and 42nd parallels. The other tributary realms of the four seas are very numerous.” A Qing Dynasty copy at the Royal Geographic Society in London does not bear any erasure.
With all other extant Ricci-Li maps outside China showing the phrase “between the 15th and 42nd parallels” to denote the Ming territories, it behooves China to present the two other hand-drawn versions of the Ricci map said to be at the Nanjing Museum and at the Liaoning Provincial Museum, to prove that they do not contain the erasures. However, both copies have been kept under lock and key in the last 70 years, and not accessible to non-Chinese scholars. In all likelihood, the two copies at the University of Minnesota and the US Library of Congress came from creative Chinese dealers who had access to state sources. By selling them to US entities, China could cite these copies as the authentic ones, unlike the Ricci-Li maps that for centuries had been kept in foreign archives.
