The provincial maps of Korea are stylised versions of the surveys of Chong Sanggi (1678–1752) whose maps were made in a consistent scale. The first map in the album is a circular semi-cosmographical world map developed in Korea during the seventeenth century. The other maps in the album include: a map of China and Korea, which prominently features the Great Wall of China, the Huang He, and Yangtze rivers; two maps of the Ryukyu Islands; and eight maps of the Korean provinces. The traditional map of Korea proper is not present. 

The Sunderland Collection

The ‘Ch'onha chido’ (‘Map of the World Beneath the Heavens’) is a traditional Korean atlas produced in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The album consists of twelve maps beginning with a semi-cosmographical world map first developed in Korea during the seventeenth century. The remaining maps feature China and Korea, the Yellow River, the Yangtze River, two maps of the Ryukyu Islands, and eight maps of the Korean provinces.

The provincial maps of Korea are stylised versions of the surveys of Chong Sanggi (1678–1752) whose maps were made on a unified scale and could be combined to create a single map of the whole country. The margins of each map are partly decorated with flowers, foliage, and birds; several mountains are depicted as erupting volcanoes or covered with snow.

The ‘Ch'onha chido’ (‘Map of the World Beneath the Heavens’), or sometimes ‘Cheonha jeondo’, (‘Complete Map of the World Beneath the Heavens’), is a peculiar type of circular world map developed in Korea during the seventeenth century. It is based on the Korean term for map, ‘chido’, translated roughly as ‘land picture’. The Ch'onha chido maps were made in response to the encounter with the geographical knowledge of Europe but based in content on traditional East Asian sources.

The structure of each map consists of an internal continent with historical place names, an internal sea with place names connected to descriptions of Taoist immortality, and an external continent and sea. The oldest known Korean map that survives today is a world map dated 1402, although even the earliest example dates later to about 1470. Curiously, most of the Korean map archive dates from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

An Album of Traditional Manuscript Korean Maps, from the ‘Ch'onha Chido’