315 – “Each Person Is A Nation Unto Himself”: Rocaterrania

“Fantasy is like fruit and dessert, and reality is like meat and potatoes and green beans,” says Renaldo Kuhler. The 76-year-old artist is speaking at the beginning of a trailer to an upcoming documentary about his work. Kuhler had a lifelong career as a graphic illustrator, earning a living rather than a reputation. But the unillustrious illustrator,  sporting the long, white beard of unheeded prophets and out-of-fashion philosophers, had another career, a brilliant and secret one.

Since his teens, Kuhler has been pouring all his private anguish and artistic energy in a project that has remained secret up until now. That project is Rocaterrania, an imaginary country somewhere between the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York and the St Lawrence River on the border between the US and Canada. 

The boredom and isolation of a youth spent on a ranch out in Colorado drove the young Kuhler to fill notebook after notebook with illuminations of his own private country. Despite its slightly latinate name, Rocaterrania was founded by Eastern European immigrants (Kuhler himself is the son of a German immigrant). And despite the somewhat saccharine appellation reminiscent of Ruritania, Kuhler’s country is all but peaceful, prosperous and quiet.

Reflecting his own inner turmoil, Rocaterrania experienced revolutions aplenty, suffering under the successive rule of presidents, dictators and czars. Many figures are as stark and tragic as any in a Dostoevsky novel. And then some. There even was a female ruler who went around the streets, catching urchins to castrate them. 

“Each person is a nation unto himself, and what he does with that nation is up to him,” Kuhler explains at the end of the aforementioned trailer, that offers a brief and intriguing glimpse into the grim fairytale he constructed in the far reaches of his imagination.

It’s no wonder Kuhler was reluctant to publicise the existence of his troubled ‘inner country’. But it is a shame – the illustrations of the people and places in Rocaterrania look fantastic. And in any case, now there’s the upcoming feature-length film, also called Rocaterrania, by documentary-maker Brett Ingram. 

This map shows the location of Rocaterrania on the St Lawrence River, and its borders with the US and Canada. Multicultural Rocaterrania possesses a corridor to the river, in which is located the town of Katerin Shtot (sounds Yiddish, or at least looks like it because of the phonetic spelling). A large, uninhabited area to the west is called Westerwald (German). A town on the east bank of Lago Eldorado (Spanish) is the town of Novo Tyumen (Russian), on its west bank is Biala (which sounds more Polish), and further west are places called Serbia, East New Serbia and Black New Serbia.

Rocaterrania as a New World dystopia with an Eastern European flavour: this is somewhat reminiscent both of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (Michael Chabon’s allohistorical detective novel set in an Alaskan homeland for the Jews) and of The Jew of New York (a graphic novel by Ben Katchor about a real-life, failed attempt to found a Jewish utopia in… upstate New York).  All of which reminds me that I urgently need to find a good map of Birobidzhan – Stalin’s gift of a ‘national home’ to the Soviet Union’s Jews… Generous enough, if that particular piece of real estate hadn’t been located in deepest Siberia…

Many thanks to Brett Ingram for providing me with this map of Rocaterrania. And many thanks to Jonathan Zuber for putting me on the trail of this wonderful country. More information on Rocaterrania, the documentary here on Mr Ingram’s website (here’s a link straight to the trailer). 

(Illustration by Renaldo G. Kuhler. Used with permission from the Collection of Brett Ingram)

314 – Watch the Road: World’s Earliest SatNav

 

 

Satellite navigation (SatNav) is a lot older than previously thought. In fact, it’s even decades older than man-made satellites themselves. This fantastic contraption, called the ‘Routefinder’, showed 1920s drivers in the UK the roads they were travelling down, gave them the mileage covered and told them to stop when they came at journey’s end.

The technology – a curious cross between the space age and the stone age – consisted of a little map scroll inside a watch, to be ’scrolled’ (hence the word) as the driver moved along on the map. A multitude of scrolls could be fitted in the watch to suit the particular trip the driver fancied taking.

The system has several obvious drawbacks – a limited number of available journeys, and the inability of the system to respond to sudden changes of direction. Also: no warning of road works or traffic jams ahead. 

Not that there were that many traffic jams in 1920s Britain. The Routefinder, one of many bizarre patented gadgets now on display at the British Library, didn’t take off because there were too few drivers, i.e. potential customers, at that time in Britain. Or maybe also because it was a bit impractical, distracting drivers from what they were supposed to watch – the road.

Many thanks to Toni Hudzina for sending in a link to this story (here on ananova).

313 – A Handy Map of San Francisco Bay

The metropolitan area surrounding San Francisco Bay, better known as the Bay Area, includes over 100 cities (San Francisco, Oakland and San José being among the most populous) and counts about 7 million people. It is the 4th-largest metropolitan area in the US and the 47th-largest in the world.

Many non-locals will be surprised to learn that San José is the largest city in the Bay Area (having surpassed San Francisco in the 1980s). Another lesser-known fact is that a map of the entire Bay Area can be created using nothing more than two functioning, interlocking hands (preferably your own).

This ‘Handy Map of San Francisco’ does not say why or whether it is absolutely necessary to paint your right thumbnail black to create the effect of San Francisco.

Many thanks to Adam Koford for sending in this map, found in a 1938 Cartoon Guide to California by Reg Manning.

312 – The Population of China’s Provinces Compared

China is the world’s most populous nation (1). That much anybody knows. But even if we know a bit more (that the number of Chinese is around 1.32 billion, which is just under 20% of all humans alive today), that figure is still too big to mean much beyond that China is ‘number one’ (2). This map compares the population of China’s provinces (plus the ‘renegade province’ of Taiwan), autonomous regions and municipalities with those of whole countries, and thus helps shed some light on that issue.

Here, for easy reference, is a list in descending order of magnitude of those Chinese territories (their population in brackets) followed by the foreign country they compare to.

1. Guangdong (113 million) Germany plus Uganda (3)
2. Henan (99 million) Mexico
3. Shandong (92 million) Philippines
4. Sichuan (87 million) Vietnam
5. Jiangsu (75 million) Egypt
6. Hebei (68 million) Iran
7. Hunan (67 million) France
8. Anhui (65 million) Thailand
9. Hubei (60 million) U.K.
10. Guangxi (49 million) Burma/Myanmar
11. Zhejiang (47 million) South Africa
12. Yunnan (44 million) Colombia
13. Jiangxi (43 million) Tanzania
14. Liaoning (42 million) Argentina
15. Guizhou (39 million) Sudan
16. Heilongjiang (38 million) Poland
17. Shaanxi (37 million) Kenya
18. Fujian (35 million) Algeria
19. Shanxi (33 million) Canada
20. Chongqing (31 million) Morocco
21. Jilin (27 million) Afghanistan
22. Gansu (26 million) Saudi Arabia
23. Inner Mongolia (24 million) North Korea
24. Taiwan (23 million) Yemen
25. Xinjiang (20 million) Madagascar
26. Shanghai (18 million) Cameroon
27. Beijing (16 million) Angola
28. Tianjin (12 million) Cuba
29. Hainan (8 million) Austria
30. Hong Kong (7 million) El Salvador
31. Ningxia (6 million) Sierra Leone
32. Qinghai (5 million) Slovakia
33. Tibet (3 million) Jamaica
34. Macau (0,5 million) Cape Verde

Some obvious conclusions (from a non-expert, non-Chinese point of view):

• Most of China’s main administrative subdivisions are literally unheard-of in the rest of the world, save for some obvious exceptions like Tibet, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong.
• The names of some provinces sound especially indistinguishable (or at least  are rather indistinct to western ears): Hebei and Hubei; Shanxi and neighbouring Shaanxi;  not to mention Jiangxi and Guangxi; or Hainan, Hunan and Henan.
• The well-known pattern of heavy population density on the coast and lesser density inland belies the fact that even in the most far-flung provinces, the populations are not exactly tiny (Xinjiang: 20 million, Inner Mongolia: 24 million), Heilongjiang: 38 million, Yunnan: 44 million), except in Qinghai (5 million) and Tibet (3 million).

This map was sent in by Isaac Lewis, who was “inspired by the map that did something similar for US states and international GDPs (here and here) in order to “get a perspective on just how many people 1.3 billion actually is.”

“Mostly the provinces and their labels are very close in population,” Mr Lewis explains. “The largest difference is between Henan province (98.7 million) and Mexico (106.7 million). Other than that, they’re mostly within 1 or 2 million of each other.”

 

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(1) The world’s least populous nation? The British dependency of Pitcairn in the Pacific, by some reckonings (50 inhabitants). Or the Vatican (800 registered inhabitants, very low birth rate) by others. The smallest non-dependent, ‘real’ nation? How about Nauru, another Pacific island nation, with about 10,000 inhabitants.

(2) The Indians, by the way, are number two, with 1.1 billion people (or 17% of the world’s population). India is slated to surpass China as the world’s most populous nation in a few decades’ time. 

(3) See note in bottom left hand corner of map.

311 – Transnistria, A Soviet Fly in Geopolitical Amber

 

Now that Russia has recognised the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the improbable phantom nation of Transnistria (1) might be gearing up for its own fifteen minutes of geopolitical fame. Like the aforementioned breakaway regions of Georgia (itself a former Soviet republic), Transnistria is a bizarre splinter off  the old Soviet block, and now a client state of Russia.

Transnistria occupies the sliver of Moldovan territory hemmed in between the river Dniester (2) in the west and the Ukrainian border in the east. It is about 400 km long, from north to south, and typically no more than 20 km wide, sharing its snake-like look on the map with a few other nations, notably Chile, Norway and the Gambia. Except that Transnistria doesn’t appear on most maps.  No other country recognises the independence of this freak accident of world politics, not even Mother Russia – at least not yet (3).

The birth of Transnistria is an indirect result of the death of the Soviet Union. When the Soviet Union broke up in the early 1990s, Moldova was one of the 15 constituent republics that gained its independence. Moldova, which shares language, culture and history with neighbouring Romania had the distinction of being the only Romance-language Soviet republic. Its ‘western’ orientation hasn’t helped it integrate into Europe, as the Baltic states have done: Moldova remains one of the poorest countries on the continent, notorious for corruption, smuggling and prostitution. 

It may be argued that Moldova’s near-failed-stateness is the cause – or the effect – of its conflict with Transnistria. That strip of Moldovan territory was heavily industrialised in Soviet times, and populated with migrants from other parts of the Soviet Union: Russians, Ukrainians and others. That typically ‘Soviet’ mix of nationalities felt no desire, post-USSR, to be integrated into a state dominated by Moldovans, and looked east for protection.

Cossacks and Russian regular troops helped Transnistria fight its brief war of independence from Moldova in 1992. Since then, the rogue republic has remained virtually unchanged, frozen in time like a Soviet fly in geopolitical amber. Lenin statues still adorn the Transnistrian town centres, and the main ideology seems to be nostalgia.  

The self-declared republic’s regime is styled as ’super-presidentialism’ under the leadership of one Oleg Smirnov (4), who managed to obtain 103.6% of the votes in a particular district during the 2001 election. Transnistria still has a large manufacturing base, and profits greatly from non-regulated exports (or ’smuggling’, if you’re into the whole brevity thing) and other activities that thrive best in the twilight of disputed sovereignty, including arms manufacturing.

Transnistria might yearn for the sunny Soviet past, but those days are not returning. These days, it’s one of Russia’s westernmost outposts, an illegal, southern mirror site to Kaliningrad, which sits uncomfortably on the Baltic coast, completely hemmed in by the EU member states Poland and Lithuania. Transnistria is similarly surrounded by Moldova and the Ukraine, which has in the past exerted pressure on the small statelet as a way of getting back at Russia.

A notable example was the gas crisis of 2006, in which Russia suddenly and dramatically raised the price of its gas exports to Ukraine – a warning to its newly-elected, pro-western president  Yushchenko not to stray too far from Moscow’s sphere of influence. Ukraine retaliated by instituting measures to stem Transnistria’s illegal exports, strangling the local economy. This mechanism of war by proxy might make Transnistria a more ‘convenient’ flashpoint in a future conflict between Russia and the Ukraine than the Crimea, the sovereignty of which is directly disputed between both countries.

This map taken from this page at moldova.org  - “Moldova’s best international gateway”.

 

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(1) Official full name: Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic. Also known as Transdniestria, Transdniestria and Pridnestrovie (the latter its Russian short name). Some official Moldovan sources insist on not using the region’s self-chosen name, but instead refer to it as the ‘Administrative-territorial unit of the Left Bank of the Dniestr’.The implication is that using the name chosen by a wayward territory for itself opens the door for its official recognition.. This is reminiscent of the insistence of some Arab sources to refer to Israel as the ‘Zionist Entity’. 

(2) Hence the breakaway republic’s name, literally ‘across the Dniester’. The river’s name derives from ancient Sarmatian, and can be translated as “the near river”. The Dnieper River, from the same source (linguistically, not hydrographically), means “the far river”. The old Greek name for the Dniester is Tyras, which still survives in the name of the Transnistria’s capital, Tiraspol.

(3) Tellingly, both Abkhazia and South Ossetia have recognised Transnistria’s independence.

(4) Real name.

310 – The World, Justified

 

Angela Detanico and Rafael Lain are a pair of young Brazilian artists, working in their home country and in France. Some of their work explores fonts and maps. Typography meets cartography in this little work, entitled ‘The World, Justified’.

It shows the world we live in as only one of four possibilities, the others being a left-aligned, centred and right-aligned world. Our world is a justified one, i.e. aligned with both left and right margins.

One could make all sorts of geophilosophical comments about these alternate possibilities. Or about the fact that the world we live in is neither left, right nor centre, but ‘justified’. Could it really be that, as Voltaire’s Candide asserted, tout va pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possibles (‘Everything is for the best in the best of possible worlds’)?

Many thanks to Eric Angelini for sending in this map, found in its original context at the aforementioned artists’ website, detanicolain.com (click on the red line).

309 – Around the World at Twice the Speed of Fogg

It took the hero of  Jules Verne’s 1873 novel ‘Around the World in Eighty Days’ exactly that amount of time to circumnavigate the globe. Phileas Fogg leaves London on 21 December 1872, accompanied by his manservant Passepartout and arrives back in the British capital after what he first believes to be 81 days; but having crossed the International Date Line and thus having gained one day, Fogg still manages to win the bet – £20,000.

The bet was to prove that the completion of a new railtrack in India made it possible to travel around the Earth in four score days. The advent of air travel in the early twentieth century obviously would diminish the travel time required for such a feat – the current record for fastest circumnavigation still stands at 32 hours, 49 minutes and 3 seconds (set in 1992 by an Air France Concorde).

It’s still possible to travel around the world without airborne transportation, of course. And here also the travel times have greatly diminished since Phileas Fogg’s era. This map is a proposal for a round the world trip, only travelling by boat and train (as Fogg did), starting at and ending in New York. The trip would only take 42 days. Here’s the itinerary:

• New York – Chicago (train)
• Chicago – Seattle (train)
• Seattle – Vancouver (bus – granted, there were no buses either in Fogg’s time)
• Vancouver – Anchorage – Tokyo (boat)
• Tokyo – Osaka (train)
• Osaka – Shanghai (boat)
• Shanghai – Beijing (train)
• Beijing – Moscow (train)
• Moscow – Brussels (train)
• Brussels – London (train)
• London – New York (boat)

The longest leg of the trip would be the freighter line from Vancouver to Tokyo via Anchorage (13 days), the most expensive one would be the London to New York boat tyrip on board the Queen Mary 2 ($2,449).

In total, the trip would cost $5,312 (which converts to about £2,900 in today’s money). This map, found here on Very Small Array, an excellent map/infographic-oriented website, dates from 5 May 2005. Be warned that current prices may differ. And send a postcard.

Blogger Pulled Out Alive From Trainwreck of Economy

Dear all,

Blog posts of the “I am sorry I haven’t been posting any messages of late” kind are annoying and redundant, a bit like going round someone’s house to explain why you can’t come visit them. I shall therefore keep this intervention brief.

Thanks to all who enquired about my being alive and well. I am both. The radio silence on Strange Maps was not due to my incarceration, institutionalisation, hospitalisation or expiration. Nor was it the by-product of an extended holiday, although that obviously would have been preferable to the other options.

I’ve spent most of the last couple of weeks absorbed by such non-map-related activities  as paying bills, and earning the money to do so. And I suspect I’m not the only one finding that an increasingly time-consuming proposition, given the current trainwrecked state of the economy.

Radio silence is now over. I shall return to a more regular schedule of blogging. Should you wish to contribute to the regularity of this blog, consider making a donation via the appropriate button on the right. Or not. Freedom might not be free, Strange Maps still is.

In either case, enough of all this non-cartography. On with the maps!