Thank you very much for this most kind presentation. I allowed myself, as you can see, to change the title a little bit, so I shall proceed backwards from late maps to early boards of divination.

And my paper is concerned with one of cartographical puzzles, the so-called Sino-Korean atlases, recognized by their key maps, first sheets, circular world maps, which you could see on the flyers of these lecture sections.

Now these maps are usually referred to as wheel maps, and as you could also see from the flyer of the lectures, that these maps have apparent typological similarity with medieval mapamundi, set on Jerusalem and oriented with the east on top.

On the flyer you could see as an example one of mapamundi made after Beatus, and here I show you another version of another comparison of Beatus map, which is a manuscript map and has this manuscript flavor, as you can see.

Similarly with the wheel map it is stained from usage, so the similarity is even more striking.

And actually one could give endless examples of similar typological similarity between the wheel maps and the medieval mapamundi. I will give just two, just for one is the mapamundi by Guido da Pisa, and of course the famous Epsdorfer map, which is distinguished by its being centered, by its center on Jerusalem.

Clearly marked, as you could have noticed, the maps, the wheel maps are centered on China, also marked in this particular map by bright yellow circle.

The first puzzling aspect of the Sino-Korean atlases is that these absolutely medieval looking maps became outstandingly popular in late Chosun Korea in 18th, 19th centuries.

And when the modern Western cartography was already well established in East Asia.

However, this confusingly archaic and simplistic maps continued to be produced and reproduced in almost unchanged form, not matching at all the mainstream of modern cartography and absolutely insensible to its development.

How do we know that the Sino-Korean atlases were extremely popular? This can be judged from high number of survived copies, still not counted of these atlases and wheel maps apparently extracted from them.

They are found in many libraries and many private collections.

And one of the, the second puzzling aspect is the absence of what I call its instability and imprecision of this, of these atlases in terms that there are no, any stable external characteristics of this, of this atlas.

There is no stable title, no stable form of binding. Sometimes the maps, these atlases are just referred as to did-who-simply maps or sometimes there is no title at all.

The same with the binding, sometimes there is no binding at all. And the worst for historians of geography, cartography, there is no precise date or no precise, not much information about their authorship.

So the atlases cannot even be dated even up to the century, despite their quite late provenance.

The conventional title, Sino-Korean, was proposed in the absence of a stable original title in 1896 by French-Koreanist Henri Cordier.

And he published a study of his atlas, which was a study of the, a copy of the, of such atlas, which was acquired in 1894 by the British Museum.

And although the British Museum copy is a separate, is just a file called did-who with separate maps, but since these maps form a certain entity, the title atlas is much more appropriate than simply maps.

The title Sino-Korean has not become very current. I find it quite, quite a good convention in the absence of the general title.

However, I was severely criticized by fellow sinologists for being too China-centered for using this title.

Usually these atlases comprise 13 maps. There is the key, the key will map.

There are four, general maps of four countries, China, Japan, Ryukyu and Korea. And there are eight maps of eight Korean provinces.

Although in some, in some atlases, some maps are missing because they were extracted.

In some cases, some additional maps are added in particular. For example, in the British Museum copy, one added two maps of the capital city Seoul.

The basic set is constituted by these 13 maps. And when one looks at these atlases, one has an impression that the maps inside are all the same.

Although there are quite some differences in design, order, format, building, and sometimes even between different maps, between different, the maps of the same, for example, maps of China, maps of Korea.

As I said, the extant copies of these atlases are quite numerous. However, I do not like very much the offhand reference to this fact in the Art on Korean Cartography in the Chicago History of Artography published in 1994.

The part is written by Gary Ledyard, who says that these atlases existed in copies beyond count and are common library, museum, and private acquisitions.

Firstly, they are not that common. The extant copies can certainly be counted, although this has not been yet done.

And just to give you some idea of how numerous they are, so I personally had a chance to examine 15 atlases. One copy in the British Library, three copies in France, one in Collège de France, and two copies in Musée du Me.

And I found three copies in Germany, in Munich, in Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and in, there is much treasured manuscripts and two woodblocks.

Then one copy I found in a very unexpected context in a private collection in Helsinki, where was held the 25th International Conference in the History of Cartography in 2013.

And one of the sponsors of this conference was a very well-to-do person from Helsinki, who is also, as was his father, he is a collector of maps.

And since he tried to manifest a bit his richness to poor scholars during this conference, he invited us quite often to his foundation for reception.

And on one of these occasions I was looking at his maps and all of a sudden saw pieces of this atlas exposed on one wall and just without much knowledge of what was exposed at all.

So there is, he owns a manuscript atlas, but without much knowledge of what he owns.

Then there are seven copies, quite a lot in Kobe Museum.

I know that there are three copies in Kyoto, one copy in Tenryu Library in Japan, and of course quite some copies of these atlases in Korea.

And up to now I could only see the photos of some of these atlases.

So as I said, I personally examined 15 copies and the number I know turns around 20.

The Sino-Korean atlases are distinguished by quite uniform internal structure in the set of maps, and as I already said, there is striking lack in the uniformity of their general title, which is quite unusual actually for the East Asian maps.

So these atlases appear under, yes I missed one of the slides, but which I described.

So the titles under which these atlases appear either use the name, which is not very easy to translate, which I translate as Earth as Carriage Atlas, you did who?

And the name, this name is based on this quite well-known map, which was the first map of the atlas, which was first published in 1555, which is called Carriage as Earth General Map.

The question of this name is quite an interesting, but it's far beyond the scope of this paper.

I will just say that the term Yu refers to the carriage of the Chinese chariot, and that this map is well-known because of this publication in the Joseph Needham study of Chinese geography.

This map, and this we shall need for my, a bit later, so I call your attention that this map is distinguished by depiction of the desert zone Shamu, and by placing the Yellow River source as the star-lodged lake in Xinchui High.

However, as far as the Sino-Korean atlases are concerned, the name Yudi was used as just for the atlas, for the world, in the sense of the world atlas.

Then there are quite some other titles which appear.