'Cartographic Traditions in East Asian Maps' explores an uncharted region of study

East Asian mapmakers began rendering their corner of the globe centuries before they considered the wider world. "Cartographic Traditions in East Asian Maps" examines these geographical depictions made by the artisans and bureaucrats of China, Korea and Japan.

The maps featured are primarily from the 18th and 19th centuries. Such a narrow, if storied, sliver of history would seem arbitrary unless the stated goal of the author was to explore the shared experience of East Asians during that period — namely, the opening of the global frontier and the foreign influences that accompanied it. However, the maps of feudal Japan are so downsized that much of the artistry that Pegg writes of so lovingly is unintelligible. The Chinese maps, while legible, lack captions for those of us unversed in Manchu.

The book began as a proposed article in a periodical that grew and transformed as its author delved further into the relatively unexplored field of East Asian cartographic traditions. Pegg is disarmingly candid with regard to his lack of expertise on this topic. His desire, he explains during the introduction, is not to stake a claim on this vein of academia, but rather to pique the interest of eager scholars. But most readers won't find him to be amateurish. To the contrary, they may be scared away by the depths of detail this book asks them to navigate.

"Cartographic Traditions" falls somewhere between a lavishly produced coffee table book and an insightful treatise. Pegg will deserve some credit when the next book on East Asian cartography is published — that is the book we should be looking forward to.