Picture this, friends and neighbors: You’re standing in
front of a globe—one of those old-timey affairs you might find gathering dust
in your grandfather’s study, the kind with brass fittings gone green with age
and countries painted in colors that haven’t been accurate since Eisenhower was
president. Someone asks you to point to Asia. Simple enough, right?
Wrong.
Dead wrong.
Because what you’re looking at, what your finger touches,
what you think you understand—that’s a lie. Not a little white lie, mind
you, but a centuries-old whopper of a deception, the kind that gets carved into
copper plates and chiseled into limestone like the Ten Commandments, becoming
gospel truth simply through repetition.
The British Empire—now there was a monster if ever there was
one—had a particular gift for naming things. They called the Arab countries the
Middle East. Egypt. Sudan. Iraq. Yemen. The whole lot. Never mind that
these places sprawled across different continents, that some belonged properly
to Asia while others sat smack-dab in Afro-Eurasia. Geography, you see, is a
slippery thing when you’ve got an empire to run.
Then there was the Far East—China, Mongolia, Japan,
Indonesia. The term first crawled out of Europe in the 12th century like
something emerging from a cellar door you should’ve kept locked. By the time
the rulers and explorers and traders were taking their eastern routes, the name
had stuck like gum on a hot sidewalk.
Here’s the thing about colonial thinking, and this is
important: When you’re standing at what you believe is the center of the world,
everything else becomes the periphery. The edge. The other. Europe
positioned itself as the brain, and Asia became… well, Asia became something to
be studied, cataloged, conquered. An object, not a subject.
They had a fancy word for this kind of thinking: Orientalism.
In 1978—the year John Travolta was dancing in Saturday
Night Fever and Stephen King was scaring the bejesus out of folks with The
Stand—a professor named Edward Said published a book that would blow the
whole thing wide open. Said taught at Columbia, Comparative Literature and
English, and his book Orientalism became the kind of work that changes
how people see the world. He took a scalpel to the Western way of viewing the
East, cut it open, showed everyone the rot inside.
J. J. Clarke, another academic type who knew his stuff, put
it this way in 1997: Orientalism refers to the various attitudes shown in the
West toward Eastern ideas, religions, and philosophies. But—and here’s where it
gets interesting—the term itself is problematic. Loaded. Like a gun nobody
wants to pick up but everybody keeps staring at.
The word first appeared in France in the 1830s. Pretty soon
it was everywhere—in Romantic literature, in paintings, and most importantly,
as a lens through which the West could view the East as something they’d
created. A product. A thing to be consumed.
Said also took a hammer to the term Middle East.
Middle of what, exactly? East of Western Europe, sure. But west of India. South
of Russia. The phrase only makes sense if you’re standing in London or Paris,
pretending the whole world revolves around you.
And that brings us to the really disturbing part of this
story.
You ever heard of the Prime Meridian? Course you have. That
imaginary line running through Greenwich, England, dividing the Earth into East
and West like God himself drew it with a ruler. Except God had nothing to do
with it.
In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference, the world’s
powers got together and decided—decided, mind you, like they were picking a
restaurant for dinner—that Greenwich would be zero degrees longitude. The
starting point for all of time and space.
A German cartographer named Heinrich Berghaus had been
drawing maps of Asia for decades before that conference. Beautiful maps.
Detailed maps. The Atlas von Asia he published between 1833 and 1858 was
preserved in the Perthes Collection in Gotha, where you can still see them
today if you’re inclined toward that sort of pilgrimage.
Here’s the kicker: Berghaus never left Europe. Not once.
This man drew intricate maps of the Qing Empire in China, showed the southern
coast and islands of the South China Sea with stunning accuracy—and he did it
all from his comfortable European home, borrowing information from Jesuit
missionaries and British hydrographers. To him, Asia wasn’t a real place. It
was an idea. A product of mercantile capitalism and imperial ambition.
But wait—there’s more darkness in this particular closet.
A French cartographer named Albert-August Fauvel drew a map
in 1876 called Province du Shantung. And this map, this one beautiful,
rebellious map, placed Beijing—not Paris, not Greenwich—as the prime meridian.
The center of the world. The Qing Emperor’s throne became the zero point from
which all longitude was measured.
Can you imagine? The audacity of it. The sheer nerve.
Of course, the handwritten notes on the map suggested that
this perspective—this non-Western way of seeing—was considered less accurate.
Incomplete. Wrong.
Because that’s what monsters do, friends. They convince you
that their way is the only way.
Now, here’s where the horror story turns into something
almost comical, if it weren’t so tragic: That famous spot at the Royal
Observatory in Greenwich where tourists stand with one foot in the Eastern
Hemisphere and one in the Western? Where they take their pictures and think
they’re standing at the exact center of the world?
They’re standing in the wrong place.
More than 100 meters west of where they should be, to be
precise. The true zero-degree line is 102.5 meters to the east. The error
exists because the Earth isn’t a perfect sphere, because the instruments were
wrong, because local gravitational forces affected the measurements.
But mostly? The error exists because nobody cared about
being right. They cared about being agreed upon.
In 1881, before the conference, the United States alone had
over 50 different time standards. China had its own longitude system. France
had its own zero-degree meridian running through Paris—and their observatory,
founded in 1666, was older than Greenwich by nine years.
Twenty-nine different domestic meridians existed worldwide
by the mid-19th century. Twenty-nine different ways of seeing. Twenty-nine
different centers of the world.
So in 1884, President Chester Arthur pulled together
representatives from 25 nations in Washington, D.C. The British Empire, that
great colonial monster at the height of its power, used its naval supremacy and
global reach to secure the vote. Twenty-two countries voted in favor of
Greenwich. Haiti—God bless Haiti—voted against. France and Brazil abstained,
probably knowing which way the wind was blowing.
And just like that, the world had a new center.
The Prime Meridian, colonialism, and Orientalism
twisted together like poisonous vines, creating a worldview so deeply rooted
that we’re still standing in its shadow today, still pointing to Asia on our
globes and maps and never questioning why we call it what we call it.
The map that lied became the map we believed.
And that, constant readers, is the most terrifying thing of
all.
Because the monsters that frighten us most aren’t the ones
under the bed or lurking in the sewers. They’re the ones we carry in our minds,
the ones we inherit from history, the ones we never think to question because
everybody knows—everybody knows—that this is just the way things are.
Until someone like Edward Said comes along with a flashlight
and shows us what’s really in the dark.
And by then, we’ve been living with the monster for so long,
we’ve almost forgotten it’s there.
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