Getting Ready For Take Off!

I have always loved maps.

Books filled with places with distinct names, islands that seem perfectly distant, detailed legends, and jagged coastlines. Thinking about the cartographer who created the map, I wonder what information was known at the time of design and how many details might have been left up to the creative imagination. Maps represent not only physical places, but also histories and peoples, groups that intersected and overlapped, and changes over time. Name changes, too: Once Siam, now Thailand; originally Ceylon, now Sri Lanka; Northern Rhodesia is now Zimbabwe... how places change and yet retain some characteristics of itself.

I found this antique map of Southeast Asia from 1780.