Blurring the Boundaries: Integrating Techniques of Land Surveying on the Qing’s Mongolian Frontier

This article focuses on the role of spatial dynamics in effectuating the integration of two different sets of land surveying techniques. During the later stages of the Qing-Zunghar wars of the 1690s, the Kangxi emperor (r. 1661-1722) repeatedly asked French Jesuit missionaries, who had been sent to China in 1685 under the patronage of the French King Louis XIV, to join his imperial campaigns targeting the Khalkha-Mongolian borderlands. In the shadow of these imperial journeys, missionaries systematically determined latitudes with Paris-made instruments while Qing officials measured road distances all along the way with graduated ropes. A next step in the evolution of imperial cartographic practice came after the Qing-Zunghar wars had come to an end, when an all-out effort was launched by the emperor to integrate the newly conquered Khalkha Mongols and their lands into the Qing polity. As part of the effort, missionaries were asked to produce a map of the new frontier by integrating European and East Asian practices, which led to the discovery of a technical incompatibility. In 1702, the problem was solved by the precise measurement of the terrestrial degree and, immediately after, the restandardization of the Qing’s most basic unit of length, the chi 尺. Thus, I argue that the turn of the eighteenth century saw the crystallization of a new or hybrid Qing cartographic practice, driven by the need to explore the new Khalkha frontier. More concretely, I show how selected techniques as developed by the French Academy of Sciences were gradually absorbed into a pre-existing framework of Qing land surveying, a process that was shaped and facilitated by exchanges in via throughout the vast Mongolian frontier.