Mappin' the Land Part II: Từ biển đến sáng ngời biển

Welcome back to the first continuing series at this blog, which is known to many as "From a Concerned Friend," and to others as a web page with some photos on it.

This evening I will be featuring maps from Subjects #2 and #3 that are meant to represent East Asia. To East Asians who don't read Roman orthography, however, they may appear to bear no relation to what the region actually looks like. So, without further ado, let's look at these Map Wrecks.

Here is the map drawn by Subject #2, who, if you would kindly recall from my most recent post, is a North American. While this map features every country from East Asia--excluding Timor-Leste--it is also, sadly, shaped not like any geographical landmass that I am familiar with, but rather like a plumbing fixture from a hypothetical planet of bad plumbers.



Subject #3, similarly a North American, was faced with roughly the opposite problem. While his countries are shaped more or less correctly, he clearly had trouble recalling recent Eurocentric history, lumping together Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Burma into "Rest of SE Asia."



And nobody knows what the Philippines are shaped like.

 --A Concerned Friend

 P.S. Thanks to ____, my correspondent from Italy/the West Indies/Vietnam and life partner, for the Vietnamese translation in the title.