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Geographical Map of the Great World is a map of the world drawn by Matteo Ricci, an Italian Jesuit missionary, when he preached in China. After thirty years' printing in Beijing, the block print of Wanli in Ming Dynasty has been lost in China.
The Grand Universal Geographic Map collected by Nanjing Museum is a color picture book in the court of the thirty-sixth year of Wanli in Ming Dynasty (1608), and it is the earliest and only existing map of the world in China.
Matteo Ricci drew a great geographical map of the world on the basis of the map of the western world at that time, which changed the popular pattern of putting Europe at the center of the map at that time. But put East Asia at the center of the world map, so that China will naturally be at the center of the map.
This created a model for China to draw a map of the world.
Of the five continents drawn on this map, each continent is divided into different colors.
Mountains are depicted as landscapes, rivers as hyperbolas and oceans as dark green. The whole map is harmonious and layered.
Outside the map circle, there are some small maps, such as nine days map, heaven and earth map, solar eclipse map, lunar eclipse map, equatorial northern hemisphere map, equatorial southern hemisphere map, China map, etc., which contain astronomical geography knowledge and broaden the horizons of Chinese people at that time.
The illustrations in the map have obvious characteristics of the times.
In the ocean, there were 9 different types of sailboats in the16th century. In various sea areas, there were 15 marine animals such as whales, sharks and sea lions, and there were 8 kinds of land animals such as elephants, lions, ostriches and dinosaurs on the Antarctic continent.
This map also retains all the mother's prefaces and postscripts, which is of precious historical value.