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Zha Ma Lu Ding (Jamal al-Din): Ta (Yuan) i-t’ung chih
(The Record of Great Unified Great Yuan)《大元大一统志》(13th)
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Taken from: Arabic Astronomical tables in China: Tabular Layout and its Implications for the Transmission and Use of the Huihui lifa by Li Liang.
Taken from: Islamic Astronomical Tables in China The Sources for the Huihui li by Benno van Dalen
In the first decade of the thirteenth century, Chinggis Khan initiated the rapid expansion of the Mongol territory from the steppes on the northern border of China to a world empire that covered the largest part of the Eurasian continent. By the 1260s, the empire included both the Iranian part of the Islamic world and China, and travel between the various parts of the empire was safe and relatively quick. This not only allowed commerce to flourish, but also made possible an exchange of craftsmen and scholars and of scientific knowledge.
Thus it is known that a Chinese astronomer named Fu Mengchi or Fu Muzhai was active at the astronomical observatory in Maragha (northwestern Iran), which was founded in 1259 by the Ilkhan ruler Hulegu Khan, grandson of Chinggis. It is very probable that this astronomer provided the technical details of the so-called Chinese-Uighur calendar, a lunisolar calendar of Chinese type described in many Islamic astronomical handbooks from the Mongol period.
On the other hand, the official annals of the Yuan Dynasty, whose first emperor was Hulegu’s brother Khubilai Khan (1260-1294), inform us that a “westerner” (i.e. Muslim) named Zhamaluding came to China in 1267 and offered to the emperor seven astronomical instruments and an astronomical handbook or almanac. Yamada (1980) and Yabuuti (1997) identify Zhamaluding as the astronomer Jamal al-Din Muhammad ibn Tahir ibn Muhammad al-Zaydi from Bukhara, who served the Great Khan Mongke (1251-1259) in the Mongol capital Karakorum.
In 1271, Zhamaluding became the first director of the newly founded Islamic Astronomical Bureau, which would continue to operate parallel to the Chinese Astronomical Bureau for almost four centuries.
Taken from: The Cambridge World History: Volume 5, Expanding Webs of Exchange ...
https://books.google.be/books?isbn=1316297756
Benjamin Z. Kedar, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks - 2015
Taken from: Zha Ma Lu Ding, his life, works and significant contributions to the Chinese science of Astronomy and Calendar in the Yuan Dynasty (1206-1368) by Isa Ma Isa Ma’Ziliang.
Taken from: Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia In the thirteenth century the Mongols created a vast transcontinental empire tha... by Thomas T. Allsen
The Bukharan astronomer Jamal al-Din (in Chinese transcription, Zha-ma-lu-ding) prepared in 1267 a terrestrial globe for the Grand Khan Qubilai (Kublai, Khubilai) called the:
Kurtu-al-Ard:《元史∙天文志》:苦来亦阿儿子, 汉言地理志。其制以木为圆球，七 分为水，其色绿，三分为土地，其色白。画江河湖海，脉络贯串于中。画作小方 井，以计幅圆之广袤，道里之远近。The text (digested from the: Record of Astronomy, the Yuan History) says: Kuratu-al-Ard, in Chinese language means Geographic Record. It was a wood made globe, 70% of it is covered by water and colored with green, and 30% of it is covered by land and colored with white. Rivers, lakes and seas are drawn on the surface of the globe. Venations are permeated in the middle and drawn up many small squares which could be used to measure wide areas and road distances.
And Jamal al-Din endeavoured in 1286 to prepare, with a Sino-Muslim staff, a massive geographical compendium equipped with maps: The Record of Great Unified Great Yuan《大元大一统志》 (Ta (Yuan) i-t’ung chih). As Jamal al-Din put it in his memorandum to the Grand Khan: Now all the land from the place of sunrise to sunset has become our territory. And therefore, do we not need a more detailed map? How can we understand distant places? The Islamic maps are at our hands. And therefore, could we combine them (with the Chinese maps) to draw a (world) map?
A document concerning the progress of the Imperial Library Directorate in preparing the Ta [Yuan] i-t’ung chih dating to 1286 relates that following discussion among the principals, which included Zha-ma-lu-ding, a report was made to the throne on the: geographical materials [ti-li te wen-tzu] available to the compilers. For example, on the former Han [i.e., Sung] territories, they had some forty or fifty registers [ts’e] and most importantly for our purposes, the memorial then adds: As for Muslim maps [H ui-hui t’u-tzu] we, as a foundation [for our work], have an abundance [of them] and we have summarized them, making a single [i.e., composite] map.
Jamal al-Din’s team completed its work in 1303, relying on Muslim maps deposited at the Imperial Library Directorate in Khanbaliq (Beijing) for the coverage of Islamic and probably also of other foreign countries.
At some later date, there is the atlas of the sinicized Arab Shan-ssu (Shams [al-Din]) who authored in the fourteenth century a work entitled Hsi-kuo t’u-ching: Map Book of the Western Countries.
While none of these maps has
come down to us, the: Map of the Countries of the Northwest that the Mongol court issued in about 1330, and that focuses on Central Asia but marks also Damascus and Egypt, survives in a post-Mongol
collection. (see fig 1 and 2) The impact of Muslim mapmaking must have been evident also in Li Zemin’s contemporaneous: Map of the vast Diffusion of Resounding
Teaching that contained much information on the far west; this map has not survived, but it surely influenced the depiction of the hemisphere’s western part in the Korean map of 1402, because a
Chinese map of 1541 that resembles it claims to be based on Li’s work. Yet with the collapse of Mongol rule in China in 1368, and the rise of the Chinese Ming dynasty, government sponsored
efforts to utilize Islamic cartographical lore for a better visualization of the known world came to an end. The maritime voyages of Zheng he in the years 1405-33 made use of knowledge gathered
under Mongol rule.
It was during this period of intense scientific contact between the two cultures that the Chinese started producing world maps that included Europe and Africa (with nearly correct shape). See:
-Ch'uan Chin and Li Hui (1402)
And also in these days (in fact earlier) in the Islam zone world maps occurred that gave a more correct shape to Africa. The details of this process are however unknown.
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The Yuan dynasty was also the time that Ibn Battuta and the Polo’s went to China and Wang Dayuan, a merchant, went up to East Africa and Yang Tingbi and Yiheimishi went as ambassadors to places in South India after which Ma’bar twice send zebras as tribute to China.
Fig 1: Map of the Countries of the Northwest that the Mongol court issued in about 1330, and that focuses on Central Asia but marks also Damascus and Egypt, survives in a post-Mongol collection. The original got lost only a copy in : Wei Yuan 魏源 in 1842 is left.
Fig2: The map is strikingly similar to one of the maps of Hamdallah Mustafi, dated to around 1330. (though known only from a 16th-century copy).
