ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Image-Text Relations in Kim Jeongho’s Geography of Nineteenth-Century Korea

• In Event: GRAPHICS AND TEXT TWENTY YEAR LATER-1: Patterns, Charts And Maps For The State

English Abstract

Several decades ago, historian of Chinese cartography Cordell Yee highlighted the interplay between image and text in premodern Chinese maps, urging scholars to situate maps within broader textual and visual traditions such as landscape painting, literature, and geographical treatises. His critique of modernist view that evaluated Chinese maps by the standards of mathematical precision opened new possibilities for understanding diverse representational practices of Chinese mapmaking. This perspective also illuminates premodern Korean cartography, which developed within a shared Sinographic cultural context. My paper examines interactions between image and text as representational strategies in late Joseon (17th to 19th centuries) geography by focusing on Kim Jeongho (c. 1804–c. 1866), allegedly the greatest cartographer of premodern Korea. Over roughly three decades leading to his 1861 Geographical Map of the Great East, Kim produced numerous maps and geographical treatises that he regarded mutually dependent. Yet Kim’s understanding of map-text relation differed from what Yee observed in Chinese cartography. While Yee emphasized a complementary dynamic in which textual detail offset the imprecision of images, Kim treated maps and texts as mutually reinforcing instruments of precision and accuracy. His strategy paired increasingly abstract maps with textual compilations supplying dense geographical information. This mutually enhancing relationship reveals a key feature of late Joseon geography: the production of maps and treatises as a collective, cumulative enterprise of the state and literati-officials, who regarded the geographical knowledge as an essential tool of governance.

Author

• Jongtae Lim, Seoul National University