  This review summarises results of recent magnetic and chemical abundance
surface mapping studies of early-type stars. We discuss main trends uncovered
by observational investigations and consider reliability of spectropolarimetric
inversion techniques used to infer these results. A critical assessment of
theoretical attempts to interpret empirical magnetic and chemical maps in the
framework of, respectively, the fossil field and atomic diffusion theories is
also presented. This confrontation of theory and observations demonstrates that
3D MHD models of fossil field relaxation are successful in matching the
observed range of surface magnetic field geometries. At the same time, even the
most recent time-dependent atomic diffusion calculations fail to reproduce
diverse horizontal abundance distributions found in real magnetic hot stars.
