234 National Geographic Magazine. 
Many writers upon Korea seem prone to attribute the mapping 
of the country to the result of explorations and observations 
made by foreigners. I believe this assumption to be erroneous 
and think it can be readily proven that, although the Koreans 
may have known practically nothing of the outside world up to 
the time of the treaties, some twenty years ago, they had, never- 
theless, long before this formed an excellent idea of the configu- 
ration of their own country. The first important work accom- 
plished by outsiders was the survey of the common boundary of 
Korea and China by the Jesuits, acting under the orders of the 
Chinese Emperor Kang-hsi, in the year 1709. Severity of climate 
and roughness of country prevented the party from making more 
than a preliminary examination of the districts that they passed 
through, but a few fair determinations of latitude and approxi- 
mations to longitude were obtained, and the general direction of 
the boundary determined. With the aid of these data, supple- 
mented by information from native sources, a map was constructed, 
in which the Korean peninsula was connected with the general 
system of the world’s coérdinates and proper names were given 
in our own alphabetic characters. This map, which forms the 
basis of most of the representations of Korea in use at the 
present day, shows its origin in the transliteration of proper 
names in accordance with the Mandarin Chinese and not the 
Korean pronunciation of the Chinese characters employed to rep- 
resent them. 
The information from Korean sources which the missionaries 
must have utilized in completing their work was doubtless 
attained by them in the form of native maps. Of these there are 
several good ones in use at the present day, two of which would 
seem especially worthy of notice: (1) the large map of twenty 
sheets dividing the peninsula into sections by parallel lines drawn 
from east to west, and (2) a map giving the country in eight 
sheets, by provinces. The key to the latter, showing the entire 
kingdom, as well as one of the expanded sheets showing the 
Kyongsang province in the southeast, and the Nakdong river, 
the most important stream of the land, are appended to this 
paper, and will serve to indicate the progress independently 
attained by the Koreans in the art of map making. These plates 
have been reproduced from a copy of an original now in the pos- 
session of Mer. J. G. Blanc, the French Missionary Bishop of 
Korea, to whom it served as an accurate guide at the time of his 
