The San On Map of Mgr. Volontieri
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was most familiar. In view of the fact that the water bodies were referred to by their English names and unaccompanied by their equivalent in Chinese, the former explanation seems more probable. There is however, no ready means of establishing how much existing information was available to him at the time, and the answer must await further research into the progress of the charting, the circumstances under which Volonteri worked and the amount of cooperation rendered him by the authorities.
Fr. Volontieri attempted to portray the relief of the area in order to bring out the relative location of the settlements. It has been written by his biographer, Lozza, that 'he reconnoitred on foot, villages, small towns, plains and mountains in order to get to know in exactitude the true distances between one place and another, and to give maximum precision to the map'. His apparent ineptitude in relief representation by contours was a far cry from the close match between the elevations he recorded and the actual surveyed heights. The 'contours' shown on the map are certainly not lines linking up points of equal height nor are they spaced out at regular intervals. Far from being concentric rings, as contour lines should be, they are often merely broken arcs or even continuous spirals. In areas with no prominent heights, groups of these lines exhibit a scalar pattern and wherever a major river valley occurs, there is a conspicuous lack of any elevation representation.
Perhaps one should not be too critical of the map on cartographic and technical grounds, for the greatest contribution of Fr. Volontieri's effort lies in making available a wide range of information on the settlement pattern in San On. In no way had the Catholic priest allowed his religious belief to influence the features he selected for recording on the map. Apart from the obvious inclusion of the Roman Catholic Chapels, of which there were only five in the multitude of settlements, he also truthfully recorded the locations of 'pagodas (temples) of some consideration'. Amongst the settlements he noted, he made a clear distinction between their sizes and importance, ranging from Mandarin Residences, large and small market towns of his day to villages, some of which could not have contained more than ten families in the 1860's. He also indicated all the important tracks and mountain passes, vital for communication between the major towns and village groups.