Ming dynasty work shows how Chinese understood the world in the 1600s

Long before the digital age, a Ming dynasty scholar made it his mission to map human knowledge from a Chinese perspective. The result was an encyclopaedia spanning 127 volumes known as the Tushu Bian, or Compendium of Illustrations and Texts. The work – published in 1613 – was compiled by Neo-Confucian scholar Zhang Huang and drew on more than 200 printed sources across several decades to document