Can a map be folded up and carried?

That time, that place

Joseon already had good maps. Precise ones were held in government offices, and the geographical gazetteers were well organised.

The trouble was that you could not use them. A large map has to be hung on a wall or spread on a floor. Being hand-copied, each one took a long time and picked up errors in the copying.

A map was an office's possession, not a traveller's.

Why this question

Kim Jeong-ho redesigned the map as an object.

He cut the country into twenty-two horizontal strips and made each fold like a screen, so a strip folds down to the size of a book. Take only the strips you need. Join all twenty-two and the map stands 6.7 metres tall.

And he cut it into woodblocks. Cut once and you can print any number of identical copies; the errors that creep in through copying disappear.

Distance he marked with dots along the roads at ten-li intervals — count the dots instead of applying a ruler. Walled towns, garrisons, beacon posts, relay stations and granaries each got their own symbol, so the map could be read without writing everything out.

What was found

The blocks were finished in 1861 — the most precise national map made in Joseon, and the first that could be folded and carried.

One thing should be added. It is widely told that Kim Jeong-ho climbed Baekdu Mountain repeatedly and walked the whole country, and that he was jailed and died for making the map.

These stories are not supported by the sources. They appear to have spread through colonial-period textbooks, which had use for a picture in which Joseon could not recognise a map of its own land and killed the man who made it.

What he actually did was gather, cross-check and synthesise the maps and gazetteers that already existed. He was not a man who measured a country on foot; he was a man who turned scattered material into a single usable object. Less dramatic, and harder.

Terms on this card

Scale and symbols