Seems like it's very specifically chosen to preserve distances and reduce distortion along the longitude lines closest to China. Perhaps it is useful in that capacity but it introduces distortion for the entire rest of the world.
I guess it really puts the 中 in 中国 (中 means middle, 中国 means "middle country" and is the Chinese name of China)
It's fascinating to see a Mercator-style projection that does not produce a huge Greenland.
Maps like these must all have been frustrating to plot out before the advent of non-Euclidean geometry explained a bit better what was going on with the numbers, certain forks in the mathematical road taking you where things didn't quite make sense, and there was nothing you could do about it, except start over from a different point and or geometrical approach.
Also, people figured out the Earth was round long ago exactly because of these sorts of discrepancies. There just wasn't a lot of value in being hyper accurate since the purpose of a map before the invention of ocean ships was just walking from one city to another along roads.
This projection heavily distorts areas where it is not so obvious, as they are in the middle of the Atlantic and Pacific ocean, but also parts of Africa.
It's annoying when English names of countries are significantly different than what the countries call themselves. Besides China = Zhongguo, off the top of my head there's Japan = Nippon and Germany = Deutschland.
It's a thing in all languages, because not every language has all the sounds of every other language.
For example, in Chinese, Canada is Jianada, America is Meiguo, Brazil is Baxi, England is Yingguo.
My understanding is that Japan has a similar story as the European explorers who first made contact there were Portuguese and couldn't pronounce Nippon correctly.
When I was a kid, a lot of US maps where US-centered. They would chop Eurasia down the middle and include some overlap on the edges (so places like India might show up twice).
It's not really sino-centered though. It's indian ocean centered at best. As another user pointed out, it says it exists to see the world from a different perspective. It's not to be useful, only to show how things can look so much different with different perspectives.
It is quite funny to see the US and the Americas generally kinda cast to the side in this map.
While it's obviously putting China and Asia in the middle (actually looks like India is right in the middle) ... as far as making certain areas look bigger or smaller than actually are, compared to the standard mercator style projections ... Russia and Greenland seem to be the "losers" here while Africa looks relatively huge.
Africa is huge- many people underestimate it, although in this case it is a bit too large compared to India in the middle. Also the colorscale makes Sahara and other low desert areas too green - the habitable part is not so great.
I love the one that shows Japan at the top very heavenly looking, and then the British Isles at the very bottom looking like the savage end of the world
In case anyone is OOTL, that's the Chinese word for China, and it can be translated as "middle kingdom" or similar, implying that they are literally in the center of the world.
It's a way every culture tends to think about themselves, TBF.
I'm Chinese, I've never seen a map like this before. We usually just use Mercator but split along the Atlantic ocean instead of the Pacific. This map is just kinda bizzare. Why is Antarctica so prioritized? Why's it in portrait orientation? I think it's just intentionally weird, which is still cool.