TERRITORIAL claims are sometimes initiated by pundits and cartographers. Take for instance the nine-dash line which first appeared on an official Chinese map in 1948. Lines with features similar to the nine-dash line appeared in privately produced cartography as early as 1933.

At that time, nobody knew what those lines meant until China started delineating the western seaboard of the Philippines with those imagined dashes. In the spring 2021 issue of China Explorers, a magazine of the China Exploration and Research Society, there is an article entitled "Some Stories Related to the 'Atlas de Filipinas dated 1900': The World Map of Geographia" written by a certain L.L. Tam of Hong Kong. He affirmed that "Bachi," which is a misspelling of "Bashi" referring to the Bashi Channel, does not appear in the Atlas de Filipinas.

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