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  • Fascinating map. Did the old cartographers create inland lakes and northern seas out of thin air? In any case, I rather wish Amerigo Vespucci was better known; he didn't make the same mistakes that Columbus made.
    – LateralFractal
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 13:37
  • 1
    @LateralFractal-They did not create those things. On a modern map of China you will see large lakes in the highlands of Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, similar to what's on the old map. Their maps were surely based on observations of people who had been there, or even Chinese sources. But they didn't have any good way of knowing and representing precise size and scale, or the accurate contours of the large land masses. They knew something like in the "northwest province there is a great lake called x that feeds the Great River, so they put something on the map to indicate that as best they could.
    – user2590
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 16:35
  • @LateralFractal (continued).. And there are northern seas like on the map: The Arctic Ocean. But again, they did not know the exact contours of the great land masses, they just knew something like "up north is a great sea." You cannot really know the contours of the continents or any large land masses unless you navigate or travel around them and make scientific measurements (or take an airplane or satellite ride..) - in 1570 that had not yet been done.
    – user2590
    Commented Sep 27, 2013 at 16:40