RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR CARTOGRAPHY.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

Halbinsel Liau tung: Kwan tung-Gebiet ("Liaodong Peninsula: Guandong Area"). An exceedingly rare large 15-sheet map of China's strategically pivotal Liaodong Peninsula, printed for senior German military commanders during the Russo-Japanese War and the Japanese siege of Port Arthur. We have traced one complete set at the Berlin State Library, and the University and State Library Darmstadt has an incomplete set of six sheets.For the German army, possessing up-to-date information on Liaodong was pressingly essential. Despite being officially neutral during the conflict, Germany had significant geopolitical interests in north-eastern China, having acted with Russia and France in 1895 to curtail Japanese expansion in East Asia after the First Sino-Japanese War. Russian-Japanese hostilities, in particular the gruelling engagements around Port Arthur, also threatened to spill over into Germany's nearby maritime territorial concession, Qingdao.This highly detailed cartographic production, printed at a scale of 1:42,000 from Russian military maps from 1898-99, shows settlements of every size, topography and spot-heights, roads, railway lines, and other information of use in any potential military operation.

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