Caveat: The Joseon Dynasty’s Online Mapping Utility

JoseonmapThere is a very cool online zoomable map of Korea, pieced together from images from an atlas made in 1861. I put an image of the overview of the area covered by this old atlas, at right.

The detail and accuracy of this map is quite amazing, considering it was made not just pre-satellite but essentially pre-Westernization, although I suspect it was made in response to Western contact, if that makes any sense.

Matching place names to modern place names is rather difficult, because the names are in handwritten hanja (Chinese characters). Nevertheless, I managed to locate the town of Juyeop-ri (주엽리, hanja 注葉里), which is an area I walk through every day on the way to work. There is now a subway station there.

I zoomed in and did a screencap of from the map, and then put a red star on it, below. On the scale of the map, for my daily commute to work, I walk from the lower right of the red circle I made to near the top of the red circle I made.

Juyeop


I have a few days off from work, for the provincially mandated summer break. Per my usual custom, these days, I'm doing very little with my free time, except thinking of it in terms of undoing my incipient burnout.

[daily log: 1 km]

2 Comments

  1. A couple of other comments
    (1) We to read these old Chinese character names from left to right, correct? Some of them read: “山ABC”. I can only guess can only guess these are places called “CBA Mountain”.
    (2) What about the ones that go up and down? Top to bottom or bottom to top?
    (3) The D-Word is absent in the panel with Ulleongdo. “Just sayin’..”.
    (4) Seoul itself seems curiously unmarked. A large empty circle?
    (5) Never mind on (4), I see Seoul in two insets at different scales at the very top right. Cheonggyecheon is easily visible, the palaces, and the old city wall.
    (6) The entirety of today’s Seoul south of the river is barely even marked by any named villages. Except for a few riverside villages, the core of today’s Gangnam area seems to be marked by only a single named village, which I find just south of today’s Gangnam Station. This is from an eyeball comparison with Naver Map. (The village is NW of 대모산 大母山; and directly south of 중랑천, the thin tributary of the Han River in eastern Seoul).

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