Chinese and East Asian Cartographic Traditions

Pei Xiu (224–271 CE), a court official of the Western Jin dynasty often called the "father of Chinese cartography," is known chiefly through the surviving preface to his largely lost atlas, the Yu Gong Diyu Tu ("Maps of the Regions of the Tribute of Yu"), in which he articulated six explicit principles of accurate mapmaking: the use of a graduated rectangular grid, correct orientation of directions, accurate measurement of distances, and careful adjustment for the real elevation, obliquity, and curvature of terrain relative to the flat surface of the map itself — a rigorously stated cartographic methodology that predates comparable Western theoretical statements by well over a millennium.