Lands hidden until Satellites?

In Civilization III, there are a number of ways to find out what is on a given square (mountain vs. desert vs. lake etc.) ranging from actually moving a unit next to it to trading maps with another civilization to flying airplanes over it. However it is possible for a large enough empire to theoretically not share maps. However just after space flight is the tech of Satellites which will reveal the entire world to the player (which most games turns out to just fill in small pieces of ocean).

So how do we get that to actually happen on land, a country that from the time of reasonably accurate maps (say 1600 until the age of satelites capable of sending down pictures) is unwilling to show to the outside world what its country looks like. Could we end up with a Japan that is technologically able to prevent being opened to the outside world? Somewhere else? Would a Lands of Rice and Salt situation (Europe wiped out) give the possibility of say China going into space without having an interest in the Americas (or something similar)

Ideas?
 
Basically you're asking for Wakanda from Marvel comics. A technologically superior civilization that's also wildly secretive and isolationist. They'd also need to be a borderline police state to keep people from selling knowledge to foreigners who do manage to sneak in. If you take Japan as an example, the Western powers had pretty good maps of the islands all through the isolationist period since it's very hard to suppress knowledge like that.

I think that the closest that we've had from real history is Bhutan who's culture and history remained comparatively unknown to the West until the 1930's and 40's mostly because of their inaccessibility, general lack of valuable resources, and isolationist policies. I think that if Bhutan had been more restrictive on foreigners during the British period and then somehow developed a small weapons industry and further paranoia about foreigners during WWII they could have remained largely "unexplored" even longer.
 
theoretically, maybe something like the Amazon or the Congo Basin. suppose that some significantly powerful native state forms which controls the mouth of a major river, patrols the borders, and is at, like, Sentinelese levels of "keep the fuck out of our land". that could prevent such an area from being known to most of the rest of the world. Wakanda is definitely the closest fictional analogy, though, as @Escape Zeppelin said
 
or, Bolivia? say where there's a surviving smaller branch of the Incas and the resulting country is two-thirds Spanish descendants and one-third Incas with a hidden religious city.
 
Top