ABSTRACT

In the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries Qing officials in China periodically instructed their Mongolian subordinates to make maps of the regions they governed. The Qing were aiming thereby to gain information about the Empire, but the Mongols had other concerns. This article focuses on Mongolian map-making practice and argues that it differed from that prevalent at the time in both China and Russia. Concerned less with conveying practical information than with locating the domain in a cosmological understanding of the world, the Mongol maps were holistic. They were also both ‘participatory', involving several different actors in their compilation, and ‘relational', concerned to demonstrate the stance of the map-making subject in relation to the map’s receiver (the office of the Lifanyuan and ultimately, the Qing Emperor).