An International Symposium on the History of Cartography on Mapping Asia. Cartographic Encounters between East and West
–Leiden, The Netherlands
The central theme of the conference is the mutual influence of Western and Asian cartographic traditions. The focus will be on where Western and Asian cartographic history meet. Geographically, the topics will be limited to South Asia, East Asia and Southeast Asia with special attention to India, China, Japan, Korea and Indonesia.
Topics and questions which will be discussed are:
- What defines Asia? The arbitrary borders between Europe and Asia on the map
- Asian cartographic traditions
- Asian toponomy and cartography
- Cartography and intercultural contact
- Missionary and colonial cartographies of Asia
- Asian cartography in the collections of Leiden University Libraries
- Philipp Franz von Siebold and the cartography of Japan
- and all papers of merit
- The Asian collections of the special collections are internationally famous.
- The Bodel Nijenhuis Collection has large numbers of historical VOC maps.
- The Indonesia collection has many maps of the 19th and 20th century and includes the collections from the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT) and the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV).
- The Siebold collection contains a lot of Japanese maps and the collection of the Sinology Institute holds several Chinese maps.
E-mail: m.storms@library.leidenuniv.nl