UCLA

Contrary to the view of national borders as a product of modernization, the Great Wall was considered to came into being almost two thousand years earlier as a permanent boundary dividing the imperial territories from its northern adversaries. Refuting both views, I illustrate that in the mid-sixteenth century, the Great Wall emerged on maps as a territorial borderline, while being rebuilt as a more massive defensive structure along the northern frontier. This dissertation traces how geopolitical, socioeconomic and cultural changes interplayed with cartographical practices to create the image of the Ming Empire with clear borderlines around its territory. Combining textual and visual analysis, I examine how maps not only reflected but also drove changes in boundary- making practices. Seeing maps as a creative process of enabling and formulating new spatial relations, my analysis demonstrates how maps facilitated a new vision of frontier spaces and promoted efforts to transform landscapes, regulate mobility, and actualize territorial claims in the frontiers. This dissertation is organized chronologically and thematically. Part one examines the evolving images of the empire and its frontiers from the trans-dynastic timeline of Song-Yuan-and early Ming periods. After then, I evaluate how security crises from the mid-fifteenth century led to the court utilizing maps to gain more detailed geographic knowledge and strengthen military control. Part two focuses on how the image of the Great Wall had changed throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Maps promoted the idea of the Great Wall as a natural demarcation between the Ming Empire and the steppe world, supporting investment in the construction of a massive defensive structure. In Part three, I investigate how maps that had been developed in northern inland frontiers influenced conceptions of maritime frontiers. Borrowing existing cartographic conventions of the northern Great Wall, officials and native elites created a new notion of a maritime border in coastal defense maps of the mid to late sixteenth century. This dissertation is the first scholarly attempt to elucidate the development within indigenous cartography to explore an emerging notion of territorial borders in Ming China. My analysis emphasizes the roles of maps in building, imagining and popularizing a borderline in the age of increasing contacts with the outside world.