What we mean by maps that have ‘gone wrong’ is maps with big, stinking, awful map blunders, like a country that’s gone missing, or a fictional mountain range, or a mis-drawn border that crosses all sorts of boundaries – the sort of mistakes that could lead to the unfortunate map-user getting hopelessly lost. We love them because they provoke the question: What on earth happened here? And the answer is most often a fascinating story.

the significance of the Japanese Buddhist cartography of Xuanzang’s Great Tang Record of the Western Regions for the origins of the academic study of Buddhism in Europe.

It is often said that the increasing availability and applicability of remote sensing technologies has contributed to the rise of what can be called ‘satellite-based activism’ empowering non-state groups to challenge state practices of seeing and showing. In this article we argue that NGO activism is not challenging the sovereign gaze of the state but, on the contrary, actually reinforcing it.

The demonic female, an object of male anxiety and desire, has long been a stock character in Japanese Buddhist literature. This article examines two female realms in the Japanese literary and visual imagination: Rasetsukoku, a dreaded island of female cannibals, and Nyogogashima, a fabled isle of erotic fantasy.

I trace the persistence and transformation of these sites in tale literature, sutra illustration, popular fiction, and Japanese cartography from the twelfth through the nineteenth century […] until what was once a land of demons south of India was rediscovered as an erotic paradise south of Japan.

Mongolia’s last ruler, the Bogd Khan (1870–1924) commissioned the artist Balduugin Sharav to produce a large painting of the Mongol countryside titled “Daily Events”, a work that constitutes an unusual cartographic “picture-map” intended for a special public display. The work (now known as “One Day in Mongolia”) depicts the Mongolian people as a distinct ethnic group in quotidian scenes of Central Mongolian (Khalkha) nomadic life. This article demonstrates how the covert connections between the scenes together construct a Buddhist didactic narrative of the Wheel of Life, and argues that this picture-map was the result of the Tibetan-born ruler’s anxieties over ethnic identity, national unity, and the survival of his people, who strove for independence from the Qing, as well as their safe positioning vis-a-vis new political neighbors.

This interview explores David Max Moerman’s study of the largely unknown history of Japanese, Buddhist world maps. His work uncovers an alternative history of Japanese Buddhism shaped by a Buddhist geographic imaginary that engaged multiple cartographic and cosmological worldviews.

… when the Japanese kept insisting that Buddhism was a specific religion that originated in north India, westerners were puzzled. There was no cult of Buddha in India, and northern India in particular was largely Muslim.

On the early modern encounters between Europeans and Japanese Buddhists and how they shaped each other’s understanding of Asia.

Here you will find presented a number of maps of places in Ancient Asia to help as a reference for those interested in understanding the geography and history presented in Buddhist texts.