Zhangzhou ware is a type of Chinese export porcelain produced during the late Ming Dynasty at the kilns of Pinghe county 平和縣, Zhangzhou 漳州 Prefecture, in Fujian Province. Formerly known as Swatow ware, it was relatively crudely potted, in comparison to Jingdezhen porcelain of the period, with many decorated in white and cobalt blue underglaze with a characteristic palette of iron red, green turquoise and black overglaze enamels.

The design motifs of a subset group of large dishes depict iconography and concepts from popular Daoist cosmology that include systems of orientational positioning, basic principles of cosmic order, celestial mechanics and correlations between heaven and earth that played important roles in Daoist visualization practices. Compositions on these dishes can include a taiji diagram, a Chinese compass, data sets associated with field allocation diagrams (fenye), circumpolar constellations “supported cosmically by water,” a comet, the eight trigrams, alternating dragon and pheonix characters (a popular iconography for yin and yang), or spiraling lines of cosmic energy (qi). The design motifs are generally based on popular Daoist textual sources like the Daodejing as well as popular visual sources like late Ming encyclopedia (leishu 類書), in particular the vernacular encyclopedia (wanbao quanshu萬寶全書, lit. “Comprehensive Compendium of a Myriad Treasures”). The aggregated and assembled motifs on the dishes were popular Daoist cosmic mapping tools and visualization aids that will be unpacked and considered in the larger context of historical Chinese cosmologies.

The atlas Guang yutu 廣輿圖 (Expanded terrestrial maps, first printed 1556 or 1557) contains a map titled “Haiyun tu” 海運圖 (Sea transportation map). This map shows the coast of China and marks the grain transport route from southern to northern China as a blank line in a sea of waves. On the following pages, a text fills the reader in with information on the voyage along the coastline depicted on the map. The “Haiyun tu” circulated in several books printed in the decades after the Guang yutu, keeping the format of the earlier work. The “Haiyun tu” also inspired other formats of maps such as colored manuscript scroll maps. In the late seventeenth century, the route-line started to appear on sheet maps of the whole Qing empire, clearly inspired by the previous line from the “Haiyun tu” as indicated by brief annotations to the route-line. This change in format and materiality—from book to sheet map—changed the function of the route. It now no longer appeared as part of a coastal map, closely tied to the description of grain transport, but became part of an integrated view of the Qing empire.