The earliest surviving edition of the Blue Map, showing China at the height of the Qing empire: only six other copies known in public and private collections worldwide. The rare 1812 edition, with the variant title ending ‘_dili tu’_, is the only one to be printed from stone, representing a continuation of the Chinese stele tradition.

The _Geographical Complete Map of the Everlasting Unified Qing Empire_ is based on Huang Qianren’s (1694-1771) 1767 printed map of the Qing empire (1644-1911), which depicts China surrounded by selected neighbouring regions. Quite unlike the European idea of a world map, the Blue Map presents China front and centre at massive scale, confining the rest of the world to the margins and visually enshrining the Qing notion of China as the Central Kingdom. ‘The intentionally vague geopolitical lines of the [empire’s] frontiers and beyond clearly indicate the Qing’s perception of the world around them [...] All foreign entities simply inhabited the fringes of the empire’ (Pegg). Although Russia, India, Thailand, Vietnam, Japan and Korea are clearly defined – especially the latter, which has a large textual commentary befitting its status as chief vassal state – there are no international borders marked. To the upper left of the map lie both the Mediterranean (‘Small Western Ocean’) and Atlantic (‘Great Western Ocean’), with both the Netherlands and Great Britain shown as islands. As stated in the preface on panel one (reading right to left), the impetus for printing the Blue Map was to reflect the expansion of empire and to highlight the new regions and administrative changes. ‘They were designed to be impressive and even intimidating, implying that they were presentation pieces intended for public display […] These maps were produced at a time when the expansion of the empire half a century earlier under the Qianlong emperor (r.1736-1796) was concluded and the Qing empire was at its greatest extent, including Outer Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Qianlong’s reign had not only seen a vast expansion of the empire but also a relatively strict censorship. With the changeover to the next emperor, Jiaqing (r.1796-1820), this censorship relaxed, resulting in the dissemination among the learned elite of geographical knowledge that before had been restricted to the court’ (Papelitzky and Pegg).

The terrestrial Blue Map was printed in at least ten editions between 1812-1825; the first of these [the present edition], was printed from stone, while the following nine were from woodblock. These editions can be divided into two sets, which evince subtle differences in their titles and visual presentation. Our map is from the first set: it has the title variant ending ‘_dili tu_’ (‘terrestrial map’) unique to this edition, along with the toponyms presented in white encircled by a white oval ring, common to all editions of the first set. The editions of the first set are all dated: September 1812, 1816, and 1823. The 1816 edition mentions another printing of October 1812 – from which the blocks had become worn from repeated use and needed to be re-carved – which both confirms our edition to be the earlier of the two 1812 issues and bears witness to the popularity of the map. Blue Maps were printed in the manner of a rubbing from a stone stele, in that the outlines and annotations are left white, while the majority of the paper ground is coloured in blue. The pigment used for the blue colour is Prussian blue, imported to Guangzhou by the East India Company since at least 1775: Blue Maps probably represent the earliest widespread use of this colourant in China. Generally, two tones of blue are used – a dark blue for land and a lighter tone for sea – with brown used in our 1812 edition to demarcate the Gobi and Taklamakan deserts. The eight sheets of the terrestrial Blue Map were designed to be presented in the traditional Chinese style, as hanging scrolls. ‘Typically, sets of multiple scroll landscape paintings of this scale would be mounted, in China, as a continuous image in a style known as the panoramic screen […] with no borders or gaps between the scrolls’ (Papelitzky and Pegg).

More than 40 copies of the terrestrial Blue Map are known to survive today, the majority of which are from the second set of editions described above. Our 1812 edition – the earliest extant, from the first set, with the title variant ending ‘_dili tu_’ and use of brown by the printer – is notably rarer. Papelitzky and Pegg cite two examples in public institutions, at Kobe City Museum and Beijing University, and another four are known in private collections (presumably including the only example of the 1812 printing to have appeared at auction [RBH]: Sotheby’s, 14 May 2019, lot 244).

Painted plaster group, on a polychrome wood fluted columnar pedestal, the reverse simply finished