The Provinces of Japan circa 1600 , 1903

Folded flat, creases still showing, this is a map that once lived inside a book. It comes from A History of Japan during the Century of Early Foreign Intercourse, written by the Scottish historian James Murdoch with his collaborator Isoh Yamagata and printed in Kobe in 1903. Murdoch had come to Japan as a teacher, stayed for decades, and set himself the enormous task of explaining Japanese history to English readers who mostly knew nothing about it. Maps like this one were his way of making the story navigable.

The colours are the giveaway that this belongs to the age of hand-tinted lithography. Each of Japan's old provinces gets its own thin wash of pink, green, yellow or orange along its border, so the country looks like a mosaic rather than a single block. Those provinces, Musashi, Owari, Mino, Satsuma and dozens more, were the real units of Japanese life until the Meiji government swept them away for prefectures in 1871. The inset in the top corner is the most useful part: it traces the Tōkaidō and Nakasendō, the two great highways, to explain the Sekigahara campaign of 1600, when armies marched along these very roads toward the battle that put Tokugawa Ieyasu in power for good.

Spellings like "Kiusiu" for Kyushu date the sheet as firmly as any signature. It was made to be consulted, not admired, which is part of its charm. Someone once unfolded it beside a page of dense history and traced a finger across the mountains to work out where an army had been.