Moses reminds the people in this Sunday’s first reading that before the Lord led them out of Egypt they had “lived there as an alien.” A rarely seen 400-year-old map of the world drawn by another “alien,” Italian missionary Matteo Ricci, S.J., is on display through April at the Library of Congress.

In the early 1600s Ricci was among the first Westerners to live in what is now Beijing. Known for introducing Western science to China, Ricci created the map in 1602 at the request of the Chinese emperor. The map places China at the center of the world.

The map identifies Florida as “the Land of Flowers.” It includes pictures and annotations describing different regions of the world. Africa was noted to have the world’s highest mountain and longest river. The brief description of North America mentions “humped oxen” or bison, wild horses, and a region named “Ka-na-ta.” Several Central and South American places are named, including “Wa-ti-ma-la” (Guatemala), “Yu-ho-t’ang” (Yucatan), and “Chih-li” (Chile).

Ricci gave a brief description of the discovery of the Americas: “In olden days, nobody had ever known that there were such places as North and South America or Magellanica,” he wrote, using a label that early mapmakers gave to Australia and Antarctica. “But a hundred years ago, Europeans came sailing in their ships to parts of the sea coast, and so discovered them.”

The Ricci map gained the nickname the “Impossible Black Tulip of Cartography” because it was so hard to find. It measures 12 feet by 5 feet and is printed on six rolls of rice paper.

The Library of Congress rarely exhibits artifacts it does not own because its holdings are so vast, but curators made an exception for the Ricci map. It is being shown publicly for the first time in North America.

An article by Brett Zongker for the Associated Press