Trilingual Map of Taiwan, “Scenic Formosa Island”

Most Innovative Map and Cartography Excellent Award in 2023 Esri User Conference

View Full Image

In recent years, Taiwan once again becomes a worldwide focus due to global politics. I have been to Taiwan only once during a one-month visiting program to Chinese Culture University (Taipei) in 2013, and I have been so fascinated by the natural and cultural landscape of this beautiful island. This non-political map aims at revealing the physical and cultural wonders of Taiwan. Putting aside all the disputes, let us simply cherish the beauty and peace of this scenic island, Formosa. As we learned in cartography class, all maps are politics and no map could be truly non-political, but I really wish to invite broader audiences from all over the world, to know more about this beautiful island, just like what its original name means, Formosa.

In this map, all the designs serve for one purpose: to reveal the beauty of this island, and get rid of politics. Different from regular "North-Up" map, this map uses orthographic projection, imitating a bird view from space. It might happen to look like viewing from mainland China, but arguably, this perspective has nothing to do with politics, but simply because of the nature: the overall shape of the island runs north-to-northeast and south-to-southwest, and its general topographic pattern is flat on the west and hilly on the east. Non-political does not mean non-humanistic, so this map also cares about people living in Taiwan, especially the local indigenous populations. Additionally, this is a "trilingual" map, or a map "In Three Scripts".

This map won the 2nd place (hornorable mention) at UW-Madison's 14th Annual Digital Salon, and is physically displayed during 2023-2024 at UW-Madison College Library (see picture alove).

At 2023 Esri User Conference, this map won the Most Innovative Map and Cartography Special Interest Group Excellence Award (see Map Gallery).

As one of the representatives of the United States, this map is on International Cartographic Exhibition of International Cartographic Conference at Cape Town, South Africa (2023).

Below is a much detailed version of introduction with cartographic techniques:

[Projection]
Different from regular “North-Up” map, this map uses orthographic “World From Space” projection, imitating a bird view from space. It might happen to look like viewing from mainland China, but arguably, this perspective has nothing to do with politics, but simply because of the nature: the overall shape of the island runs north-to-northeast and south-to-southwest, and its general topographic pattern is flat on the west and hilly on the east. Therefore, this specific perspective could better display the terrain while still partly keeping the north-south direction so that audience would not totally get lost. On the bottom-right corner, a specially designed scalebar is put alongside with the graticule to indicate the directions and distances simultaneously. Additionally, the map extent is subtly set to minimize the potential political controversies.

[Locator Map]
To better illustrate this unusual map projection, the locator map (globe) on the bottom-left also displays the extent of the main map. In agreement with the apolitical theme, the locator map only labels the physical features, such as the marine areas (oceans, seas, straits), islands, peninsulas, and the globe graticule. The locator map’s light hillshade on lands is simply an ArcGIS Online layer.

[Terrain]
The highlight of this map is undoubtedly the shaded terrain. The eye-catching hillshade is rendered after various steps based on the 30-meter Digital Elevation Model (DEM) data. Specifically, it is a combination of 20 layers, including the raw DEM layer, 5 blurred DEM layers, 6 slope layers, 6 hillshade layers, 1 slope hillshade layer, and a satellite imagery layer. They are delicately displayed in a specific order, with different settings of blend mode (normal, luminosity, overlay, soft light, multiply) and opacity, leading to this adorable rendering. In terms of the specific techniques, great credit should be attributed to Esri’s cartographer John Nelson, whose articles and videos about hillshade rendering help lay a solid foundation of this hillshade. Additionally, a generalized dashed contour line layer is displayed at a 1000-meter step, and for the bathymetry, several isobaths are generalized and displayed together with the pre-rendered bathymetric hillshade layer.

[Typography]
The typography of various labels is adjusted according to the various types and classes of geographic features, but also modestly enough to minimize its visual hierarchy so that the terrain could still pop up enough. Physical features include oceans, seas, straits, channels, islands (islets), capes, mountain ranges, mountain peaks, volcano groups, hills, plains, basins, plateaus, rivers, lakes (reservoirs), etc. Culture features are very mildly labeled, including major cities and harbors. All texts of multiple scripts (languages) in this map are using Microsoft YaHei font family for visual legibility and aesthetics.

[Inset Map]
Non-political does not mean non-humanistic. This map also cares about the people living in Taiwan, especially the local indigenous populations. The top-right inset map illustrates the distribution of 16 indigenous groups, together with the local administrative unit (city and county) of different geographical regions (northern, central, southern, eastern).

[Element]
As a map focusing on the physical geography, some geographical facts about Taiwan are places on the negative space, such as area, area rank, west-east width, north-south length, coastline length, highest points, and a brief summary of the mountains. The northernmost, southernmost, easternmost and westernmost locations of Taiwan Island are also labeled.

[Language]
As stated in the title (“In Three Scripts”), all texts are displayed in the order of English, Chinese (traditional characters) and Chinese (simplified characters). When in some cases the two Chinese scripts are the same, then they will be combined for visual simplicity. Properly speaking, the traditional and simplified Chinese characters are the two writing forms or scriptures of the same language, therefore this map is titled “In Three Scripts” instead of a “Trilingual” one. Note that many places in Taiwan have more than one Latinization in spelling at different historical times, therefore only the relatively modern and formal one will be adopted in this map after careful comparison, for the sake of wider spread in global audiences.

[Data Source]
The data source for the terrain hillshade is NASA 30-meter SRTM dataset. Other data source includes Esri ArcGIS Online (satellite imagery, water features, bathymetry), Wikipedia (geographic facts, multi-lingual names of geographic features), and Taiwan Indigenous People’s Knowledge Economic Development Association, etc.

[Disclaimer]
I, the only author of this map, am originally from mainland China. I’ve been to Taiwan only once during a one-month visiting program to Chinese Culture University (Taipei) in 2013, and I have been so fascinated by the natural and cultural landscape of this beautiful island. As we learned in cartography class, all maps are politics and no map could be truly non-political, but I really wish to invite broader audiences from all over the world, to know more about this beautiful island, just like what its original name means, Formosa. On Apr 3, 2024, a 7.4-magnitude earthquake hit Taiwan, with epicenter at Hualien, which is the biggest one on Taiwan's record in last 25 years. I made this news map of 2024 Taiwan Earthquake based on my Taiwan map.

During Esri User Conference in July 2024, this map was featured by Esri's cartographer John Nelson during the "Mappy Hour" session.