1365 x 723 mm. Hand drawn on thin paper and laid on a larger sheet of paper. Restorations, with minor areas of loss at old folds.

Vrooman, an American missionary who arrived in Canton in 1852, constructed his survey through an ingenious combination of observation and local knowledge. Unable to enter the Old City, he employed Chinese assistants to gather information and pace distances between principal sites, using the city gates as reference points. Vrooman compared these measurements with his own observations from outside the walls. When Canton was subsequently opened to Westerners, his survey was reportedly found to be remarkably accurate.

This manuscript is particularly important because it differs significantly from the other recorded versions. The only other institutional example of the 1855 manuscript map was that in the British Library (Maps S.T.C.38); another example has more recently entered the Library of Congress. Comparison indicates that the present map precedes the British Library state.

The decisive evidence appears at the lower left, where the present map depicts a group of separate islands labelled “Boats Rafts and Houses on Files [Piles],” together with three forts guarding the western approach to the docks. In the British Library example, this area has been consolidated into the wedge-shaped island of Shamian. Since Shamian was created through land reclamation only after the Anglo-French occupation of Canton, beginning in 1859, its appearance indicates that the British Library map incorporates later topographical information. The present example therefore appears to preserve an earlier state of Vrooman’s survey, showing Canton before the transformations caused by the Second Opium War.

A further significant difference is the absence here of the inscription found on the other recorded examples: “For Sale By Lee Mun Une Painter, Canton City South Street.” Numerous misspellings also suggest that this example may have been copied from Vrooman’s original by a Chinese draftsman unfamiliar with English.

The map provides an unusually detailed record of the city immediately before one of the decisive episodes in nineteenth-century Sino-Western relations. Canton had been the principal point of contact between China and Western maritime commerce under the Canton System. Foreign merchants were confined largely to the waterfront factories, while the walled city itself remained closed to them.

Vrooman records this complex commercial landscape in considerable detail. The American and English factories are identified near the Public Garden, with British, American, and French flags nearby. Warehouses, coal depots, lumber yards, flower gardens, houseboats, burial grounds and rice paddies appear alongside temples, official compounds, gates, parade grounds, forts and pagodas. More unusual institutions are also identified, including a home for elderly women and a leper colony. The result is not simply a street plan but a remarkably rich document of the social and commercial geography of mid-nineteenth-century Guangzhou.

Only a year after the date on the map, the Arrow incident of October 1856 helped precipitate the Second Opium War. British forces bombarded Canton, and Anglo-French troops captured the city in December 1857. The Thirteen Factories disappeared, while the reclamation and development of Shamian Island fundamentally altered the waterfront represented here. The map therefore records a cityscape that was shortly to be transformed.

Daniel Vrooman belonged to the American missionary community that became an important source of Western knowledge about nineteenth-century China. His plan is especially noteworthy because much of its information was assembled while the physical restrictions imposed on foreigners made conventional Western surveying impossible.

Several later manifestations of Vrooman’s work survive. A lithographic version was published by B. F. Butler in San Francisco in 1857 and is known in an example at the American Antiquarian Society. A substantially related map dated 1860 records the transformed city after the Anglo-French occupation and the creation of Shamian.

The manuscript tradition, however, is considerably rarer. The British Library preserves an example dated 1855, while another 1855 example has recently entered the Library of Congress. An example was recorded in the 1866 catalogue of the Bibliothèque Communale de Marseille, although its present whereabouts have not been confirmed.

The present map is distinguished both by the completeness and richness of its manuscript execution and, more importantly, by the topographical evidence indicating that it predates the other known states. It consequently preserves an exceptionally early visual record of Canton immediately before the Second Opium War and before the physical transformation of its celebrated waterfront.

References: Paul A. Van Dyke and Maria Kar-wing Mok, Images of the Canton Factories 1760–1822: Reading History in Art (Hong Kong: HKU Press, 2015), p. 45; Jonathan Andrew Farris, Enclave to Urbanity: Canton, Foreigners, and Architecture from the Late Eighteenth to the Early Twentieth Centuries (Hong Kong: HKU Press, 2016), p. 167; Valery M. Garrett, Heaven is High and the Emperor Far Away: Merchants and Mandarins in Old Canton (Oxford: OUP, 2002), p. 142; Daniel Vrooman, “Letter from China (8 January 1853),” Scientific American, VIII, no. 17 (1853), p. 130.