European-Chinese Imperial Maps and Gazetteers Related to the Qazaq Khanate and Its Adjacent Regions from the 16th to the 19th Centuries

This monograph highlights the most important stages in the history of Western and Chinese cartography of the Kazakh (Qazaq) Khanate. Its purpose is to reassess the European, Russian and Chinese maps from the 16th to 19th centuries showing the Kazakh Khanate, by using archival and historical, etymological, comparative, and linguistic methods to examine the geographical representations of Central Asia produced by Western and Chinese geographers. Specifically, this project examines the place names of Central Asia (including Western Siberia) and the Kazakh Steppe in Qing maps, in imperial gazetteers, and in maps produced in Europe and Russia.

Historical maps provide rich knowledge resources that graphically encode information about the state of some part of the real world at a given point in time. Different place names associated a region with different phases of its history and with the different languages spoken there during those phases. Toponymic information is very important for determining changes of regional objects in different phases of history. Toponyms thus represent enduring linguistic facts that are of great historical and political importance. Aiming to assimilate the toponyms of the newly conquered territories, Russian traders and soldiers who settled in different parts of Kazakhstan at the beginning of the 16th century, and later the Russian authorities, changed previously Turkic place names in various ways. During their advancing west, the Jungars encountered various groups in Central Asia.

Many of the local place names in official use since Jungar times have been changed to new toponyms. Most of the early Qing maps were created for military and administrative purposes. They have been preserved in local archives, regional libraries, the National Central Library and the First Historical Archives of China. To date, many of these are unpublished. By focusing on maps and texts relatively unknown to scholars who are not specialized in the history of cartography, this research will make a material and theoretical contribution to Central Asian studies, historical geography, and the study of colonialism.

If the reader is interested, a DVD-ROM with a PDF of the book and high-resolution graphic files of the maps can be purchased together with the book. [Price: additional € 10,00]

Nurlan Kenzheakhmet was born in Xinjiang, China, to a Kazakh family. He received his PhD for works on history (Moscow, 2005) and archeology (Beijing, 2007). He is a research professor at the Eurasian Research Institute of Khoja Akhmet Yassawi International Kazakh-Turkish University, Turkistan. From 2021 to 2023 he worked as a visiting scholar at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and the Center for Geographic Analysis of Harvard University. He has authored many works on the archeology, history and historical geography of Central Asia, among them Eurasian Historical Geography as Reflected in Geographical Literature and in Maps from the Thirteenth to the Mid-Seventeenth Centuries, published 2021 by OSTASIEN Verlag.