Chapter 24 Tianfang flying carpet turned out to be a map

The most memorable middle school days of my life were spent almost entirely in Sichuan.In my memory, the mountain country connected by peaks and ridges, with the zipper lock of Jiange in the north and the key hole of Wu Gorge in the east, surrounded me in a big basin. No matter how fierce the war was outside, it was like a mother on the inside. as safe as your womb. During the years of the Anti-Japanese War, traffic was inconvenient and information was scarce, but they couldn't stop a middle school student's curious imagination.There is a song of the Labran people in the North Pole that says: "A boy's desire is the wind's desire, and a young man's yearning is a long yearning." Outside the mountain country is war, and what is outside the war?The vast and colorful world is waiting outside, it should be worth my experience and even adventure, right?At that time, television had just started in the West, but in Sichuan, not to mention television, even movies were rarely seen a few times a year, and radio was not popular.So I looked at the two windows of the outside world, leaving only English class and foreign geography.Tired of reading English, I indulged my youthful fascination with the world map published by Yaguang Yudishe.

Half a century later, I have traveled to more than 30 countries, and I can afford even the most expensive world map. Looking back at the world map back then, I shouldn’t be surprised.But back then I was fascinated by that treasure map, never tired of reading it, and thought it was extremely exquisite, more moving than any other beautiful scenery. To get to know a foreign country for the first time, the easiest way should be stamps, banknotes, and maps.Stamps and banknotes are beautifully printed and colorful, and tell you what's special about the country, but you have to rely on correspondence or travel to get them.Maps are everywhere. Although the colors are not so bright and the objects are not so specific, they can use almost abstract symbols to mark the nature and artificiality of a country, and tell you a lot about the current situation. Capture by your imagination.The more abstract the symbol, the wider the world of imagination.Although the function of the map lies in the intellect, it can most stimulate the sensibility of imagination.No wonder I like to dream about pictures since I was a child.

The matte version of the world map was by no means cheap during the Anti-Japanese War. How could a middle school student like me in the countryside own a copy, but now I can’t remember it.I just remember that it was the most beautiful and precious possession I had at the time, a movable property that I always carried with me.On weekends, I walked ten miles from the boarding school to go home on the mountain road. When I arrived at the Jialing River, I always liked to sit on the light yellow and soft sandy shore, and wander around in the noisy but lonely sound of the river.Although Sichuan is a country of abundance, it has no destiny with Sea God, and the nearest coast is thousands of miles away.So at that time, when I looked at the pictures, what I was most fascinated by was the twists and turns of the coast, especially the country with many islands. The young Yuanzhi could drink the ocean to quench his thirst and eat the islands to satisfy his hunger.I looked at the river rushing to the south, wondering when and what month the rolling waves would take me out of the gorge and out to sea, and restore the map in my hand to a foreign land.

I was fascinated by geography, especially maps, and the task of drawing maps was a real pleasure.Soon I became a recognized "map master" in the class. Some students couldn't hand in the map homework, so they came to me for help.There are two or three girls in particular. Although they have drawn the grid in advance, aligned themselves with the original picture, and traced along the way as if looking left and right at the end of the post, they ended up in the Shandong Peninsula. Hey, it is actually higher than the Liaodong Peninsula.I can't just ignore death and do nothing, so I had no choice but to move mountains and rebuild China. After the name of "Map Master" spread, even the geography teacher was somewhat wary of me.A teacher, nicknamed "Middle East Road, Ang'ang River", occasionally draws a map on the blackboard behind his back to explain something, and then he will turn around and glance at me hurriedly to see how I react.The classmates couldn't help laughing out loud, but I tried my best to pretend nothing had happened.

In the third year of junior high school, one winter afternoon, a peddler who sold used books and periodicals came to the campus, and spread out his goods under the citrus tree.This is rare in a poor village like Yuelaichang in Ba County.The classmates surrounded him, and some bought, "Bao Gongan" or "Wanrong Ci" which was quite popular at that time.Those who like new literature spend their money to buy such things as "The Torrent", or Chinese translations of imperial Russian novels.I didn't buy a book that day, but was attracted by a map folded in half—a colorful map of Turkey.The khaki Anatolian Plateau, the soft blue Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, and the archipelago intertwined with Greece attracted my wandering eyes.For the first time in my life, I bought the first leaflet map with my meager pocket money. The temptation of beauty is more than the pursuit of intellectuality.I’m just a junior high school student. I don’t even know that Istanbul is Constantinople. Of course, I haven’t heard the story of Troy. I don’t even think that I will translate "Anthology of Modern Turkish Poetry" from the English version forty years later. .

He's just a little boy, he doesn't know anything about the ancient countries in the Middle East and the Eurasian springboard, let alone has nothing to do with him, but he has a strong sense of mystery and beauty.The boy only knows that he loves the map, and more intuitively feels that it is a symbol of wisdom, a code of beauty, and a high-value check from the world. As long as he works hard enough, one day he will be able to break the talisman and decode it, and cash that long-term check into a magnificent mountain town. . In the next two decades, although my map addiction became more and more serious, the increase in my collection was limited due to the environment.Maps in Taiwan have made little progress in drawing technology, and the old maps that are available in the market are not refined.As for foreign maps, not only are there very few imports, but the prices are too high, making them unaffordable.The U.S. News Service asked me to translate the poems of Whitman and Frost, and often rewarded me with literary books, but only for American works.Books given by friends are nothing more than poetry collections and picture albums, not maps.

It wasn't until 1964, when I was thirty-six years old, that I drove on the roads of the United States, that I saw what is called a serious map.It is a road map prepared for drivers behind the steering wheel. For example, it is three feet long by two feet wide. The folded layers can be unfolded in order to cover most of the desktop.At a glance, the general trend is obvious, the details are precise, the lines are clear and multi-functional, the fonts can be light or heavy, upright or oblique, and the colors are elegant and pleasing to the eye. In addition to the white background, only pink, line green, light yellow, etc. The distinction between protected areas, national parks, and urban residences is not as gaudy and dazzling as ordinary rough map coloring.The classification of roads is particularly detailed. Generally, if the road is paved and divided into two lanes, the distance between the mileage punctuation points is marked to facilitate the driver to plan the itinerary.

With such a detailed driving map, He Chou is exhausted, and the long distance of thousands of miles is under control.I have been teaching in the United States for four years, and I lived alone for two years. Every time I travel or go on an expedition, I can only discuss with such a map in silence. The feeling of intimacy is no less than that of a confidant. An accurate and detailed map is as useful and reliable as a clear-headed and articulate learned advisor.After my wife went to the United States, I passed on the technique of shrinking the land to her. Since then, the United States is as big as the United States, the highway is long, and it crosses states and counties, from the east coast to the west coast. member" (map reader).In this way, our wheels rolled over twenty-four states, and when we returned to Taiwan, the most valuable souvenirs in our pockets were the driving maps of each state, the street maps of each city, plus many maps of special divisions, such as national parks, etc. The number should be more than a hundred.

Surprisingly, few of the maps collected from gas stations across the United States more than thirty years ago have somehow disappeared.Occasionally I find one, unfold the creases that have been worn for a long time, and I can still see the underline drawn next to the name of the place or street on the eve of the expedition, or the mileage shown on the odometer recorded before departure, I feel like I have gone back in time , like scales and half claws engraved on fossils, testifying to some forgotten geological history. I moved to Hong Kong in 1974 and lived there for 11 years, gradually moving my Grand Tour scenes from North America to Western Europe, and the old American maps were gradually replaced by Western and Eastern European countries, and the English on the map became French, German, Spanish, Cyrillic... Even the British map has many difficult-to-pronounce Gaelic place names.The antiquity and diversity of Europe deeply attracts me: so many countries, so many languages, so many beautiful castles, palaces, churches, squares, statues, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque, how can one take a deep breath?The husband and wife are old and vigorous, shaking off the old dust of the New World, and the wheels are rolling, setting off the new dust of the Old World, like sleepwalking, galloping into a translated novel that they seemed to have known since childhood.

"With a map", just like the title of a collection of essays of mine, we drove on a completely unfamiliar road, attracted by strange city names and street names, and went deep into the rhyme of Andalusia, the castle of the Loire River The shadow of the tower runs through the United Kingdom and goes straight to the ancient capital and outer islands of Caledonia. In order to measure the length of Germany, it cuts from the Baltic coast to the Bodensee.The matte world map of my youth did not lie to me: that beautiful check was finally cashed in Europe, everything, "with a single map".

In this way, I added hundreds of new items to my map library.In addition to European countries, there are also large and small maps of Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, Australia, South Africa and Southeast Asia; including the topographic map of Switzerland included in the Swiss chocolate candy box, except for Lake Podin and Lake Geneva. In addition, the winding Alps are raised in relief, concave and convex like the mask worn by mountain gods; there is also a semi-concrete and semi-abstract street map of Prague, which uses the proportions of comics and the innocence of fairy tales to draw the street scenes on both sides of the Motao River. There are a variety of arts on the Charles Bridge, and pedestrians are coming across the bridge. In some squares, people are getting married, and even the executioner wearing a black mask is wielding a knife to execute the death row. The eight-legged reptile was crawling through. The junior high school boy who was fond of geography from a young age has become a retired professor in a blink of an eye, and the "map master" has really become a master.So someone sent a map as a gift.The girl who gave me the Swiss chocolates, chose that gift because there was that one in the box, no, that bunch of mountains.The three giant volumes of world maps in the map library were also donated successively by her daughter, son-in-law, and Professor Xu Shuzhen from the University of California, Fullerton.The "Latest International Atlas" given by Professor Xu was heavy on both material and affection, and it was weighed on a scale, and it weighed seven pounds.Among the more than 200 leaflet maps and more than 20 Chinese and foreign atlases I collected, it is the treasure of the town library. The so-called world map is actually a portrait of the earth, but it is neither an oil painting by Rubens nor a photography by Edward Steichen, but a set of beautiful and delicate semi-abstract symbols used by cartographers to create Our vast globe of water and land outlines a symbolic face.It is the crystallization of wisdom and technology, not about inspiration, nor does it pretend to be art.However, God created the world with boundless mana, and it is surprisingly colorful, which is different from the neat blueprints made by designers.The long and irregular coastline, the jagged islands, the peninsula with branches, and the tortuous rivers have formed the five senses of this world for a long time, and they have become familiar and even full of personality. . To draw a world map is to use a piece of paper to describe a ball, and use plane geometry to discuss three-dimensional geometry. Therefore, the larger the area drawn, the more curved the arcs of latitude and longitude are, which just symbolizes that the so-called horizon or horizontal line is actually uneven.The so-called level is just the myopia of ordinary people.The longitude and latitude on the big map are thrown into the distance like a parabola. Every time I see it, I will have the illusion of being extremely high and dizzy, because that is the body of the water and land cue ball, with a faint outline. The true face of the world can only be shown by a globe, so all maps are just disguised forms, which are actually a skill of making up for nature, in order to elevate mortals to eagles, clouds, and gods, so that those who look at the ground on the ground can look down on the clouds.Once I flew back to Hong Kong from Paris, and it was almost dusk over Turkey. The pilot said that Istanbul was below.In the clear sky in early summer, there is a faint khaki stretch below 20,000 feet, extending the last peninsula of the European continent.In disbelief, I was waiting to find the Black Sea or the Sea of ​​Marmara, where the twilight had deepened below. To rise enough to see the huge outline of Turkey, you must first reduce Turkey to one part in six million.To see that the world is a sphere, it must be shrunk down to one-seventy-millionth.The map uses this magical technique of shrinking the world, shrinking and flattening the world, enlarging us, improving us, and turning us into gods.It's just that the map's land shrinking technique goes a step further, sweeping away the clouds and mists between gods and men, including prayers to various gods for help in various languages, so that our sharp eyes can see clearly. But does the map show us only space?Not always.There is a famous World War II poem called "Judging Distances: by Henry Reed" that says: "At least you know / Maps describe time, not place, as far as armies / do. "It means to study and judge the appearance of the enemy's formation, we should prevent camouflage, and we cannot remain unchanged. In fact, is war the only thing that changes the landscape?Climate erosion, geological changes, artificial reclamation, etc., can change the appearance of the earth, to the extent that the vicissitudes of life and the hills of Huawu are huge.Shanghai and Hong Kong cannot be found on ancient maps, nor can Nineveh and Troy be found on modern maps. Those ruins are marked with the symbol of a three-petaled red flower only on maps that are large enough.In a thousand years, will New York, or even the United States, still be on the map?In Plato's Dialogues in his later years, he described that outside the "Pillar of Hejiulix", there was an ancient country with a prosperous civilization in the Atlantic Ocean, which was destroyed by volcanoes and earthquakes, and then landed and sank to the bottom of the sea.That is the legendary Atlantis (Atlantis).Geologists tell us that the concave right angle in West Africa and the convex right angle in South America were originally connected by land in ancient times, but now they are separated by 45 degrees of longitude.You don't even have to wait for centuries, the vicissitudes of life have already changed before your eyes.When I was a child in middle school, the geography books said that Dongting Lake was the largest lake in China. Later, I read the poems of the Tang people "Zhuozu Dongting looks at the eight wastelands", and the lyrics of the Song people "Thirty thousand hectares of Qiongtian in the jade world". I wonder how magnificent this torrent is. , no wonder Chinese poets seldom write about the sea, because only Dongting is enough.It is no wonder that Fu Baoshi's "Mrs. Xiang" can be compared with Botticelli's "The Birth of Love" as long as the Dongting is painted with waves and falling leaves.The saddest thing is that in the past 40 years, the rivers have been alluvial and artificially reclamated. The famous lake has already been divided and "shrunk", and it has fallen behind Poyang. The water in Dongting is rushing, the water in the Yangtze River is turbid, the water in the Three Gorges is overflowing, and the water in Suzhou is polluted.The maps I used when I was a child were expensive because they were old, and they turned out to be rare items that could be used to hang on to ancient times and archeology.Qu Yuan wanted to throw himself into the water today, did he know if there was still a clear current in the Canglang?The old country is no longer there, and nostalgia is hard to solve. The only way to wander in the mind is to look at the old map. So the map shows not only space, but also time.The famous American poet Robert Penn Warren once said: "History can be explained clearly by geography." I might as well say that "geography can be explained clearly by maps." Conversely, maps not only show geography It also records history; history cannot be separated from politics, so maps also reflect politics. In January 1806, feeling Napoleon's defeat of the Austrian-Russian coalition at Austerlitz, Britain's youngest prime minister, William Pitt the Younger, said: "Roll up the (European) map, It won’t be needed within ten years.” He said this too hastily, because within ten years, Napoleon would be defeated and imprisoned, and the borders of Europe would have to be redrawn.But it also shows how maps involve politics. A cartographer doesn't lose his job because politicians don't let him idle.The best example is right in front of you.The former Soviet Union made of dominoes was pushed down by Gorbachev, and the wall of East Berlin collapsed.With so many borders to be redrawn, someone wants to see where Uzbekistan is, which means there is business for the map industry.As soon as the powder magazines in the Balkans exploded, Yugoslavia exploded into several new countries. For a while, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Kosovo attracted international attention and became the focus of troubles on the map. "Seeing from the bottom of the map", there is politics in the map.As soon as politics blows, the map moves with the grass.After the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the city of Lenin was returned to Petersburg.The Czech Republic is divided, and one gram becomes two grams, half of which is still Czech, and the other half is called Slovakia.The same lake is called Bodensee by the Germans, but Lake Constance by the British.The other lake is called Lake Leman (Lac Leman) in French by the locals, and Lake Geneva in English after the city.The most interesting thing is the English Channel. The French on the other side also have a share. Why should it be named after Britain?Sure enough, it is called La Manche on the French map, which means "strait", but the original meaning of this word is "sleeve", which can also describe the narrowness of the strait.What's more interesting is that German also called the strait the Sleeve Strait (9魧rmelkanal), which is also unwilling to be named after the United Kingdom. A similar situation exists in Asia as well.The sea between Japan and South Korea is called the Sea of ​​Japan. Koreans don't know how it feels, and they want to see what it is called on a map of South Korea.However, the strait between Japan and South Korea is called the Korean Strait, which is not without merit.Similarly, the waters between Arabia and India are called the Arabian Sea. India seems to be at a disadvantage, but the Arabian Sea belongs to the Indian Ocean, so it can be considered a settlement.I really want to see the self-printed maps of India and Afghanistan. There are daggers in the map, and the self-made atlases of various countries inevitably have a sense of standard.In a general large octavo atlas, except for the history of map development, projective cartography, and general maps of world geology, topography, climate, ecology, population, language, and religion at the beginning of the volume, most of the pages are from the country. Continent by continent, region by region, and country by country are displayed, and important regions will be enlarged for detailed reading.However, due to different viewpoints, there is a big difference between the importance and trade-offs. The world atlases published by the United Kingdom and the United States all start with Europe and end with South America, and Europe begins with Britain, but the distribution of space in each country is inevitably different.In terms of area and population, Asia should have the most pages, but in all my world atlases, Asia ranks third behind Europe and North America.The 1994 deluxe edition of Rand McNally: The New International Atlas (Rand McNally: The New International Atlas) of the United States has 66 pages for North America and 62 pages for Europe. pp. 44 in Asia, 26 in Africa, 17 in South America, and 16 in Oceania. The trend of "emphasizing white and despising color" is very obvious. Hammond: Atlas of the World was published in the same year, also in octavo, with 50 pages for Europe, 38 pages for North America, and 26 pages for Asia , 18 pages for Africa, 13 pages for South America, and 12 pages for Oceania. Looking at the 1985 thirty-two format "Philips' Small World Atlas" (Philips' Small World Atlas) published by the British company Philips, the large part of Asia is still under the European style, and the number of pages is five times that of Europe. Sixteen pages, forty-four pages for North America, forty-two pages for Asia, fourteen pages for Africa, eleven pages for South America, and ten pages for Oceania.Africa is only a quarter of Europe, which is more important. The intercontinental distribution is like this, so what about the international one? The "Latest International Atlas" gives the United States 41 pages, which is almost equal to the whole of Asia.Other countries with more pages are Russia (and its old genus) 15 pages, Australia 13 pages, Canada and Italy 12 pages each, China 11 pages, Great Britain 10 pages, Germany and India 8 pages each, Japan and Brazil Six pages each.It seems that it still favors English-speaking countries. The top four in the World Atlas, the United States (twenty-five pages), Canada (eight pages), Australia (eight pages), and the United Kingdom (seven pages), are also English-speaking countries.As for the top four in the "Little Atlas of the World", except for a slight change in order, they are still the United States (18 pages), the United Kingdom (16 pages), Canada (16 pages), and Australia (8 pages), but with the addition of Japan (same eight pages) only.In contrast, China has only four pages. Another example is the "Penguin World Atlas" (The Penguin World Atlas) in the United Kingdom in 1974, showing the urban areas of 37 major cities, which belong to 16 cities in Europe, 14 cities in North America, and 14 cities in Asia. Five (Beijing, Shanghai, Calcutta, Delhi, Tokyo), one each in Australia and South America.As for Africa, there is none. This is the world through the eyes of Westerners. This point of view is certainly challenged.The "World Atlas" compiled and published by Xi'an Map Publishing House in 1982 changed the order and proportion. It started from Asia and ended with South America. 14 pages, 14 pages for Europe, 10 pages each for North and South America, and 6 pages for Oceania.Asia and Africa add up to 60 pages, accounting for exactly 60%.In contrast, in the four Anglo-American world atlases mentioned above, the proportion of these two continents combined is less than 36%. As of 1982, 1.786 million copies of this Xi'an edition of "Atlas of the World" had been printed. From the point of view of the mere book market in Taiwan and Hong Kong, paper is expensive in Luoyang, no, paper is expensive. Xian's.In fact, the real best-seller is the "China Atlas" printed in Hebei. The twenty-ninth printing of the seventh edition in 1990 has printed 14.592 million copies. It is conceivable that the demand is huge. However, although the Xi’an edition of the “Atlas of the World” mentioned above has the will to rectify white-centeredness, its influence is limited to the Chinese-speaking world. It is small in size, and the printing is not perfect. Besides, the general map of the world is still lacking in all aspects. There is still a long way to go.Eagerly, I am looking forward to the huge book of magnificent maps drawn by the Chinese. No matter how accurate the Western giant map is, it is not without flaws.On page 125 of Hanman's "Atlas of the World", Mount Kinabalu (Chinese Widow Mountain: Gunung Kinabalu) is marked with a black triangle at two locations more than 100 kilometers apart in Sabah. The black triangle is right, but the one in the south is created out of nothing, and the repetition is superfluous.On page 212, Changshun in Guizhou is mistaken for Changchun, and the population is said to be 1.74 million, but the real Changchun is near the fifth line above.Rand McNally's "The New Cosmopolitan World Atlas" (The New Cosmopolitan World Atlas) lists the world's largest islands on page 263, and ranks Ceram in eastern Indonesia between Java and the North Island of New Zealand , and note that its area is forty-five thousand eight hundred and one square miles.In fact, it is only 7,191 square miles, and it should be set back thirty places, below Shikoku Island in Japan. The map is the face of the world, and it is still drawn by Westerners. Although it is quite exquisite, it is a pity that Europe, America and Australia are the fronts, and Asia, Africa and Latin America are only the silhouettes.Let me give you three examples of mistakes made in the beautiful Western volumes, one in China, one in Indonesia, and one in Malaysia, all of which happened to be in the "profile", which inevitably makes people "suspect".Western "advanced countries" have already landed on alien planets and are painting faces of the moon and Mars. What should our geographers, map experts, and even astronomers do?