Ming dynasty work shows how Chinese understood the world in the 1600s

Long before the digital age, a Ming dynasty scholar made it his mission to map human knowledge from a Chinese perspective. The result was an encyclopaedia spanning 127 volumes known as the Tushu Bian, or Compendium of Illustrations and Texts. The work – published in 1613 – was compiled by Neo-Confucian scholar Zhang Huang and drew on more than 200 printed sources across several decades to document the concepts of heaven, Earth and humanity. “His goal was to gather all the illustrations and texts...