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In Memory of Our Dear Friend, Dr Hwa-Wei Lee

We are saddened by the news of the passing of Dr Hwa-Wei Lee on the 17 of December, 2023 at the age of 92. Throughout his life, he made many high achievements, from his position as Dean of Libraries Emeritus, Ohio University to the Chief of the Asian Division, Library of Congress and even winning the American Library Association Melvil Dewey Medal in 2015.

However, on a personal level, Dr Lee was also a dear friend of Dr Sheng-Wei Wang and Worlddiscovery.net. In the last few months of his life, he recently reviewed Dr Wang’s new book, which we are forever grateful for to have this last connection. We wish him well in the afterlife, whether that is heaven, being with his family and friends in spirit or all of the above.

We also encourage our readers and friends to visit his obiturary here to leave a comment and take a minute to celebrate Dr Hwa-Wei Lee’s life, both professional and personal.

Thank you Dr Hwa-Wei Lee for everything,

Dr Sheng-Wei Wang and Worlddiscovery.net

Here is Dr Lee’s last contribution to help Dr Wang’s work.

A Great Book to Read

I am very delighted and proud to recommend Dr. Sheng-Wei Wang’s new book ‒ Chinese Global Exploration in Pre-Columbian Era: Evidence from an Ancient World Map ‒ which lays out Chinese contributions in the world maritime exploration.

    In the book, Dr. Wang thoroughly and rigorously investigates over 500 geographical items and dozens of annotations depicted on a rare and precious ancient Chinese world map named Kunyu Wanguo Quantu《坤舆万国全图》or Complete Geographical Map of All the Kingdoms of the World. The map is also known as Map of the Ten Thousand Countries of the Earth, or Great Universal Geographic Map. The map was published in 1602 in China by Italian missionary Matteo Ricci.

    The US Library of Congress has produced a digitised edition of this map based on the map at the University of Minnesota’s James Ford Bell Library. Today there are five more copies of this map in the world: the Vatican owns one of the maps, and the other four are in private collections in Japan and France. Later copies of the 1602 edition of the Kunyu Wanguo Quantu can be found in China, Korea, London, and Vienna; one copy of the map recently was discovered in the storeroom of the Shenyang Museum in China.

    Dr. Wang’s research covers not only the geographical information of over 500 items on this map, but also their histories. The latter were totally missing or not adequately researched by other researchers in the past. From analysing the geographical and historical content of the map, she was able to derive the political landscapes of the different regions and deduce the dates/eras when they were explored before these geographical items were drawn into a map. These dates/eras overlap separately with Admiral Zheng He’s sixth and seventh voyages to the Western Oceans in the early fifteenth century, the Southern Song Dynasty (twelfth century) and even far earlier to around 5,000 years ago.

    She then compares these geographical items on Kunyu Wanguo Quantu with those on the major sixteenth-century European maps and the state-of-the-art archaeological evidence. Through this extensive, thorough, and in-depth research, she concludes that Kunyu Wanguo Quantu is of Chinese origin, and the political landscapes of these regions reveal Chinese worldwide maritime exploration in the Pre-Columbian era.

    While some map aficionados nicknamed Kunyu Wanguo Quantu “the Impossible Black Tulip” and consider this map to be a mix of “science and fantasy”, Dr. Wang provides concrete evidence at multiple levels to show that the map contains “science and historical facts”.  What a tremendous progress she has accomplished in this book!

    Living in today’s complex world bombarded constantly by information and misinformation from all sources, we must bear in mind that to know the world, we need to first know the map of the world, or simply put, the history of the world. When you dig deeper, a map can tell you not only “where” a place is, but “when” that place began to exist or became extinct, and “what” event has happened or not.

    History is a barometer for measuring humanity and human wisdom. From a map, we learn the kind of knowledge and process which enable us to shape our destiny. It is that extraordinary snapshot of Chinese civilization at the dawn of globalization discussed in her book that Dr. Wang aims to project into the reader’s mind.

Hwa-Wei Lee, Ph.D. (Univ. of Pittsburgh); Hon. Dr. Of S.S. (Ohio Univ.)

Dean of Libraries Emeritus, Ohio University 

Retired Chief of the Asian Division, Library of Congress 

American Library Association Melvil Dewey Medal Awardee (2015)

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