Visual storytelling with GIS: 3D Perspective Analysis of the View of Fuzhou

This project centres on the anonymous late-seventeenth-century drawing View of Fuzhou (Rijksmuseum, NG-1988-13) as a rare Chinese account of Sino-Dutch trade and an understudied site of Dutch presence in China. Lacking written sources on artistic practice, this project employs digital methods as storytelling tools and turns visual analysis into a narrative of Sino-Dutch cultural exchange in the early modern period. It argues that the drawing selectively adopts European, possibly Dutch, topographical conventions to visualise Dutch maritime presence. The project combines 3D elevation modelling in QGIS with a Bayesian camera-reconstruction workflow to estimate plausible viewpoints and fields of view. Preliminary analyses show how the artist compresses the Fuzhou city behind the walls while stretching the riverside foreground to highlight Nantai — the suburb where the Dutch trading post was located — and the anchored VOC ship. The project hopes to add a new digital storytelling tool to art history.