Chinese reads right to left. On maps china is on the right. English reads left to right. On maps US/England is on the left.
How were the earliest known world maps designed? Did china place themselves as the east on the right because of the importance of feeling when reading right to left?
Did the west accept these maps because they felt equally important on the west left?
Does this make any sense? Should I probably have posted this in /r/nostupidquestions ?
Hi. I can give you a partial answer, hopefully it'll help.
Classical Chinese (i.e. the common written language of scholars and officials before the Qing collapse in 1911) was actually written up-to-down first (except sometimes in the case of titles and headings; see the second map I link below), then right-to-left. Texts would be written up-to-down in columns, and the columns arranged right-to-left, and the pages read from the righthand cover to the lefthand cover. On Chinese maps, because place-names tend to be very short, they were rendered up-to-down.
Regarding the maps themselves, the term "world map" is hard to define, because in any given time period a "world map" would generally depict the world as it was known to the map-maker. Take these for example:
Song Dynasty map (1137) Map of the Tracks of Yu or Yuji tu: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic707441.files/Yuji%20tu-Huayi%20tu/Yuji%20tu.jpg
Ming Dynasty map (~late 14th cen.) Amalgamated Map of the Ming Empire or Da Ming hunyi tu: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Da-ming-hun-yi-tu.jpg
The first map was carved into a stele in 12th century China, i.e. before the Mongol conquests. Although Chinese intellectuals knew about regions outside China, geographical knowledge of those regions was limited, and textual descriptions of foreign areas tended to carry significant weight, at least relative to visual depictions.
Now, the second map was created some time after the Mongol conquests, and after the Yuan Dynasty fell to the new Ming Dynasty. This map renders a much larger world that includes Korea, Japan, Tibet, Central Asia, and even (a very inaccurate) Europe and Africa. The Mongols' penchant for moving useful technicians around their empire - including scholars and mapmakers - caused geographical knowledge to spread. But, of course, even this map wasn't really a "world map" in the sense that we understand it, because it doesn't include the then-unknown Americas.
As demonstrated from the second map, Chinese mapmakers tended to place China in the center, not on the right. And they also tended to overestimate the size of important regions (like China, Korea and Japan). While I hesitate to invoke the simplified explanation that China was literally called the "Middle Kingdom(s)," this self-imagining of China as the center was quite important in terms of map-making techniques.
I can't really answer how western mapmaking techniques developed. I also don't know for sure why Classical Chinese is written and read right-to-left, though I do know it is written up-to-down because bamboo slats were the first medium upon which scholars wrote texts/poems/etc (EDIT: first medium after oracle bones, but those are a different story). It's very easy to arrange slats vertically and roll/unroll them for storage/reading purposes.
Sources:
-Mostern, Dividing the Realm in Order to Govern: the Spatial Organization of the Song State (2011)
-Mosca, From Frontier Policy to Foreign Policy: the Question of India and the Transformation of Geopolitics in Qing China (2013)
