One of the world's rarest maps, a 400-year-old document that shows China at the center of the known world, has been acquired for the James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota. Map enthusiasts have dubbed it "the impossible black tulip of cartography," because of its rarity, importance and exoticism.
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Drawn in 1602 by Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit priest working with Chinese scholars in what is now Beijing, the six-piece map is 12 feet wide and 5 feet tall. It was carved in sections onto huge blocks of wood and then printed in brownish ink on panels of rice paper like a Chinese folding screen. It shows both North and South America and the Pacific Ocean with reasonable accuracy. China is appropriately linked to Asia, India and the Middle East. Europe, the Mediterranean and Africa also are well delineated.
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