There were the familiar striped uniforms forced on prisoners in the concentration camps, and the calculation in maps that showed the division of Poland.

The problem with this approach, Verghese said quoting the Polish-American philosopherand father of semantics, Alfred Korzybski, is that "the map is not the territory."

The Guangxi Autonomous Region, with 46m people, is more populous than Poland, yet how many people would be able to pinpoint it unhesitatingly on a map?