Footnotes

清道光至光緒 彩繪北京內城圖（標示八旗分佈）

設色紙本 立軸

This plan details the walled city of Beijing accurately depicting the architecture and streets within the symmetrical layout of the city. Beijing was built along a north-south axis running at a length of eight kilometers from the Yongding Gate in the south to the Drum and Bell Towers in the north. The city was composed of an Inner City and an Outer City. This map shows the Inner City with the Forbidden City (Zijin cheng) at the center. The Forbidden City was surrounded by a moat and was located within the Imperial City which included the Imperial gardens and the three lakes to the west. It was surrounded by a fortified wall with six gates marked in red. Beyond the Imperial city lies the Inner City, also called Jingcheng ('capital city') or Dacheng ('big city'), surrounded by another massive wall marked in blue, also with six gates.

Within this structure, the map depicts a chessboard-like network of streets and alleys running from south to north and from east to west. Imperial palaces and other key structures located along the key central axis, government offices, palaces, alleys, temples, decorated arches and gates, major streets and city blocks, official residences are roughly sketched, and only important structures such as the residences of members of the Imperial family are coloured and identified by their names. Scattered among the different parts of the map is a pattern of small circles, triangles and squares, each coloured in red, white and blue or a combination of two of the three colours. A simple legend at the top of the map explains the three symbols used for this map: the Manchurian's army is represented by circles, the Mongolian army by squares, and the Han army by triangles. Together they represent the Eight Banner (baqi) garrisons, an elite class of families with special privileges, responsibilities and military obligations central to the defense of the Qing dynasty. On this map the distribution of these round, square and triangular icons serves to identify and locate the different garrisons within the walls of the Inner City of Beijing, see Kazuko Tanaka, Analysis of the Eight Banners's Disposition on the Three Qing Dynasty Maps of Beijing' in The Memoirs of the Toyo Bunko, 74, 2016, pp. 101-130.

During the Qing dynasty, many maps of urban Beijing were printed, fewer maps were drawn, each of them with a different focus and practical purpose, showing detailed information on streets, facilities, temples and places such as the Qianlong jingcheng quantu (Complete Map of Beijing in Qianlong's reign), ca. 1750, or the water system in the Inner City of Beijing as the Jingshi chengnei hedao gouqu tu (Map of Rivers and Ditches in the Capital), dated to the Guangxu period. According to Kazuko Tanaka, very few maps show the spatial distribution of the Eight Banners. In 2016, Tanaka notes that only five maps of this type are known. They include the Daoguang Beijing neiwaicheng quantu (Complete Map of Inner and Outer Cities of Beijing in the Daogoang Period), now in the collection of the National Library of Beijing, the Jinghui Beijing jiu ditu (Finely Painted Old Map of Beijing) in the collection of the British Library, London, the Beijing neicheng tu (Map of the Inner City of Beijing) in the collection of the Royal Geographical Society in London, the Jingshi neicheng tu (Urban Plan of the Inner City of Beijing) in the collection of the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore, the Beijing neicheng tu (Map of the Inner City of Beijing) in the Kyoto University collection, Kyoto, see Tanaka, ibid.,, pp. 101-102. We may add an unnamed Map of Beijing in the collection of the Royal Ontario Museum which also displays the distribution of the Eight Banners. Three maps are painted on silk, and three maps are painted on paper like the present map. These six maps range in date between the late Jiaqing period (1796-1820) and the mid-Guangxu period (1875-1908). Regarding the dating of this rare map, the absence of any reference to foreign legations located to the south of the Inner City around Dong Jiangmi Xiang suggests a dating before 1861 when the British legation was established in the residence of Prince Chun. A dating to before 1861 ranks this map among the early examples and is an exciting discovery and an important addition to future study of Beijing during the mid-19th century.