evidence: For decades, Chinese schoolchildren have been taught that their homeland’s furthest southern reach was the underwater James Shoal (known in Chinese as Zengmu, a transliteration of "James"), which is located around 50 miles off the coast of Malaysia. Waters around the shoal are home to Malaysian oil and gas platforms. This geography lesson notwithstanding, Chinese maps gave scant attention to the South China Sea. That began to change after 2009, when a map with the nine-dash line was attached in a submission to the U.N. during a dispute with Vietnam. Today, Chinese passports are emblazoned with a map with nine dashes through the South China Sea—plus a 10th that ensures Taiwan, to which the Nationalists retreated in 1949, is counted as Chinese territory. Curiously, though, the dashes on the 2009 map (and on current Chinese passports) are located in slightly different places from those on the original 1947 map. In several cases, the new dashes hug the coasts of other Southeast Asian nations more closely, giving China an even more expansive claim to the waterway "Because the people who made the [newer] map were not strict, they didn’t follow the right image scale," says geographer Wang. "Some people are not working that rigorously." And though China also makes territorial claims in the East and Yellow Seas, these specks of land are not marked by dotted boundaries. Dashes, it appears, are reserved for the South China Sea.