Biscayne Bay Islands +Miami Beach

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10. Qisheng yanhai quantu, 1780s edition. dynasties, is the level of graphic and paratextual information printed on the map touching upon various issues. These issues include the geographical and hydrological characters of the littoral space, the strategic and navigational details about harbors, cities, and islands off the China coast, the importance of coastal defense and the dividing logic between inner and outer sea spaces. An optimal example of examining these unique characteristics of Qing coastal maps, is the charting of the Qing maritime frontier in the Coastal Map of the Seven Provinces (qisheng yanhai quantu 七省沿海全圖; hereafter the yanhaitu).10 In contrast to previous maritime atlases, where most littorals fade into the unknown, the maritime frontier in the Qing Empire is clearly documented in the yanhaitu, with most of the river-mouths, harbors, and islands identified in Chinese. Moreover, considering the level of details included in the map, yanhaitu is one of the first coastal maps that depicted China’s maritime frontier horizontally instead of vertically, with the coastal land mass in the upper half and the vast body of water in the lower half of the map.11 Thus, the eastern side of China and the western side of the East Asian Sea are rendered in a landscape orientation. The map consists of six maps and is meant to be spread out from right to left with captions as follows: 1) Huanhai quantu (環海全圖); 2) Qisheng yanhai quantu (七省沿海全圖); 3) Qiongzhoufu tu (瓊州府圖); 4) Penghu tu (澎湖圖); 5) Taiwan qianshan tu (臺灣前山圖); 6) Taiwan houshan tu (臺灣後山圖) (Figure 10). Yanhaitu reveals the importance and significance of maritime governance in the 18th century China and challenges the dominant Western narratives that deny the maritime initiatives and concerns of the Qing court before nineteenth-century western encroachment. Yanhaitu is part of a larger Qing empire-building project since the mid-17th century, exercising sovereignty over the sea by not only deploying a navy, establishing a maritime customs system, but also facilitating a series of mapping and information-gathering initiatives. Depicting contours of the coastal regions and the immediate sea space under the control of the Qing Empire, the map reflects the intense attention that administrators, merchants, and intellectuals paid to coastal seawaters, and the littoral knowledge they possessed. The 1780s version of the yanhaitu includes the following introduction: “... These books were also not up-to-date because the contemporary situation has changed dramatically. … We have to patrol the area cautiously and deliberately. But before we set up a scheme for naval patrolling, we must first evaluate coastal conditions... the information recorded in the gazetteers is not comprehensive enough for a thorough overview of the entire maritime frontier of our empire… Having this map in hand enables one to better understand the overall situation of our great maritime frontier.”