Mosca, MatthewOu Yang, Ting-chieh2026-04-202026-04-202026-04-202026OuYang_washington_0250E_29305.pdfhttps://hdl.handle.net/1773/55511Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2026In the age of Google Maps, we sometimes mistakenly assume map literacy, but the ability to read meaning within maps requires long-term exposure and instruction. While scholarship has demonstrated how Qing China (1644-1911) utilized cartographic projects in its territorial expansions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, far less attention has been paid to how new maps in the late 1800s impacted the national consciousness of Qing elites. Analyzing these new maps reveals that the Chinese nation as a spatial concept had appeared in the 1880s, earlier than China’s defeat by Japan in 1895, the year commonly seen as marking the beginning of Chinese nationalism by many scholars. In addition, these maps indicate two important realities about the construction of the Chinese nation during this period: 1) that conservatives utilized these maps to conceptualize the Chinese nation, and 2) the influence of capitalist markets upon map production. First, people involved in the creation of these maps were not revolutionaries or reformists but conservative businessmen. Although Chinese conservatives were blamed for the Qing’s failure to modernize, they used cartographic products to transmit their views of the Chinese nation to the reading Chinese public. Second, in order to maximize profits, these conservative businessmen produced their products based upon considerations of each map’s cost and marketability. Relevant factors included each map’s type of paper, size, and quantity, as well as the salaries of draughtsmen and the tastes of the public. Unlike the eighteenth-century atlases made in the Qing court, commercial map production in the late 1800s was influenced by the interactions between map businessmen and consumers of the Han Chinese reading public. Based on these two realities, this dissertation shows how the commercial and the social factored into map production and, in turn, the conceptualization of the Chinese nation in late Qing China.application/pdfen-USnoneHistoryHistoryThesis