Mediaeval Researches From Eastern Asiatic Sources Geography And History Of Central And Western Asia From The 13th To The 17th Century

Author : E. Bretschneider
Publisher : Forgotten Books
ISBN 13 : 9781330326589
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (265 download)

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Download or read book Mediaeval Researches From Eastern Asiatic Sources written by E. Bretschneider and published by Forgotten Books. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from Mediaeval Researches From Eastern Asiatic Sources: Fragments Towards the Knowledge of the Geography and History of Central and Western Asia From the 13th to the 17th Century An interesting specimen of mediæval cartography, showing the geographical knowledge possessed by the Chinese (or rather Mongols), in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, of the countries west of China and Mongolia, has come down to us in the form of a rude map which has survived from a large work treating of the institutes of the Mongol empire and published in the first half of the fourteenth century. The title of this extensive work was King shi ta tien; but it seems that now only fragments of it exist. The library of the Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Peking was in former times in possession of a manuscript copy of one chapter of the work, containing an enumeration of the stations on the post-roads in China Proper and a part of Mongolia. This now belongs to the library of the Rumiantsoff Museum at Moscow. This Chinese mediæval map, which may serve as a pendant to the curious Catalan map of the year 1375, reproduced, as far as Asia is concerned, in Yule's "Cathay," bears the title Yüan King shi ta tien si pei pi ti li t'u, or "Map from the King shi ta tien of the Yüan dynasty, representing the countries to the north-west (of China Proper)." I have seen two copies of it. One of them, in the library of the Russian Mission, was made, as the late Archimandrite Palladius informed me, from the original in the Chinese Imperial Library. Palladius, in his translation of Ch'ang Ch'un's travels, reproduces this map in Russian spelling, without however venturing any identification of the geographical and other proper names found in it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.