Southeast Asia has always occupied a special place in the imaginations of East and West. For the Chinese, the islands of Southeast Asia lay in the “southern ocean” while in India they were thought of as the “lands below the wind.” In the West, Southeast Asia was identified with Paradise and the Garden of Eden. It was also the supposed location of King Solomon’s Ophir and Ptolemy’s “Golden Chersonese” – a place of stupendous riches and strange marvels, where spices grew and unicorns roamed ancient forests.
Early Mapping of Southeast Asia documents the idea of Southeast Asia as a geographical and cosmological construct, from the earliest of times up until the dawn of the modern era. Using maps, itineraries, sailing instructions, traveler’s tales, religious texts and other contemporary sources, the book examines the representation of Southeast Asia, both from the historical perspective of Western exploration, and also through the eyes of Asian neighbors.
From the time of Herodotus and Alexander the Great to the medieval cosmologies of the Christian Fathers, Southeast Asia was as much a place of myth and legend in Western thought as it was a geographical reality. Later, with the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geographia and the ground-breaking journeys of Marco Polo and others like him, a more definite image of Southeast Asia began to inscribe itself in the contemporary cartographic record and paved the way for the great voyages of discovery in the 15th and early 16th centuries – Columbus and Bartolomeu Dias, Vasco de Gama and Magellan.
This treasure of a book was written by an expert on the subject of early mapping, a well-known figure in the field for many years. Thomas Suarez has helped create some of the finest collections of maps, both in private hands and in public institutions. He has acted as curator for exhibitions at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., the Bristol-Myers Squibb Gallery, and as an advisor for the Addison Gallery of American Art.
A student of the Julliard school of Music in the 1960s, Suarez’ special interest in Southeast Asia was awakened when he visited the region during concert tours as a classical violinist. He is the author of numerous articles on the subject of early maps, and his previous books include Shedding the Veil which tells the story of the mapping of America, and The Crustacean Codex, a fictional work set against a background of exploration and discovery.
The author sympathetically relates the difficult task faced by the earliest mapmakers who had to fight against conflicting sources and their own prejudices to represent Southeast Asia on the map. He explains, for example, the peculiar continental peninsulas which suddenly appeared in the early 16th century, and why some parts of Southeast Asia subsequently washed up on the shores of Terra Australis.
Suarez goes on to describe the growing popularity of printed maps in 17th century Europe and the rise of the East India Company which ultimately led to the colonization of many parts of Southeast Asia in the 18th and 19th centuries. Early Mapping follows the story through to the very end, closing with the exploration of the interior of the region as the final chapter in this fascinating account of Southeast Asian geography and mapmaking.
In a word, this handsome large format highly readable text recounts the fascinating story of how Southeast Asia was, quite literally, put on the map, both in cartographic terms and as a literary and imaginative concept.
Early Mapping of Southeast Asia by Thomas Suarez, Periplus Editions (HK) Ltd., 1999, ISBN 962-593-470-7, 280 pages.
Available for Rp295,000 at Periplus Bookshops in the Bali Galleria and in the Matahari in Kuta, Warung Made in Seminyak, Ngurah Rai Airport (both international and domestic terminals), Keris Gallery in Nusa Dua and in Gramedia bookstores.
For comments and suggestions, please write : pakbill2003@yahoo.com
Copyright@2003 PakBill
You can read all past articles of
Toko Buku at www.BaliAdvertiser.biz
