Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer by Timothy Brook
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What turned out to be the most important Chinese map of the past seven hundred years had been gathering dust in the basement stacks of Oxford’s Bodleian Library for nearly a century, when in 2008 an American historian became curious about an old catalogue listing and called it up. Records showed that the one-by-two-meter scroll, beautifully drawn and colored in the style of a Chinese landscape painting, arrived at the Bodleian in 1659 as part of a large bequest of books and manuscripts by the late John Selden, the foremost English legal scholar of his time, and a prime architect of the international law of the sea.
Intriguingly highlighted in Selden’s will as having been “taken ... by an englishe comander who being pressed exceedingly to restore it at good ransome would not parte with it,” the late Ming-era map broke with all Chinese cartographical convention by shunting the Celestial Empire into a corner and focusing on the South China Sea. There the ocean’s greenish wash of billowy waves is criss-crossed with what are clearly eighteen ruler-straight trading routes connecting the major ports of the region, from Japan in the north to the Philippines, Southeast Asia and the Spice Islands in the south, the first sea chart in history to do so on this scale. Who had created this unique, beautiful and mysterious work of art, for what purpose, and how had it come to rest in Stuart England?
Timothy Brook, a distinguished Professor of History at the University of British Columbia and authority on Ming China, tackles that puzzle in his fascinating new book, Mr. Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer. His earlier award-winning bestseller, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World, uses the items depicted in the tableaux of the Dutch painter as jumping off points for a tour of the first great age of global trade, a revolutionary period of cargo, corporatism and empire that shaped the world we inhabit today. His new book employs the Selden Map in much the same way:
It was an age of remarkable creativity and change. New vistas were opening, old horizons faltering, accepted truths giving way to controversial new ideas ... In the end, this book is not really about a map. It is about the people whose stories intersected with it. The venture succeeds if I can demonstrate how rich, how complicated and how globally networked this era was.
Mr. Selden’s Map is as much about 17th-century England as late Ming China. The author works backwards in a “circling maze” from the masques of Ben Jonson and food fights at the court of James II, to the contested seas of East Asia, where the upstart East India Company and its Dutch counterpart challenged the Spanish and Portuguese for control of the lucrative spice trade. The story moves on to Fujian’s dynamic seafarers and “the chimera of China trade,” Ming cartography and the fascinating intricacies of navigation and chart making.
This is one of those books that humbles the general reader with the realization of just how much interesting history there is to learn—even Brook expresses astonishment at how remarkably diverse the individuals and subjects that intersect his story turn out to be:
Odd as this may seem, one book is not enough to open all the doors hidden in the details of the map ... Those I have been able to enter have disclosed a mad variety of events and personalities that I never expected to encounter when I first looked at the map. They include the burning of Japanese erotica in London, the trade policies of Emperor Wanli, the design of the Chinese compass, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s intentional misspelling of Xanadu, the donation of human remains to the Bodleian Library, and the ancestral church of the Knights Templar, to mention but a few.
Among those personalities is the Jesuit novice Michael Shen Fuzong, converted son of a Nanjing doctor, who sailed to Europe in the 1680s and charmed the crowned heads of Europe (Louis XIV invited him back just to watch him use chopsticks, plus ça change). The first recorded Chinese to visit England, he worked closely with the Keeper of the Bodleian, Thomas Hyde, cataloguing collections and helping decipher the Selden Map (no Englishman could yet read Chinese)—their “ghostly translations and annotations in spidery European letters” are still visible. Hyde never learned that his exotic young friend perished off Madagascar on the return voyage.
Shen finds a modern counterpart in the scholar Xiang Da, who travelled to Oxford in 1935 on a similar cataloguing mission and later annotated the Laud Rutter (Shun Feng Xiang Song), another unique maritime manuscript donated to the Bodleian in 1639 that may describe the famous voyages of the early Ming navigator Zheng He (1371-1433). Xiang met an even sadder fate, tortured to death during the Cultural Revolution for his foreign travels and friendships, but not before making a calculation that may be critical to understanding the Selden Map. In a work that embodies the excitement and joys of scholarship, Brook writes:
I like the fact that Xiang’s careful work on the rutter has now come back to prove something about a map he never had the chance to see: that the ruler is indeed the scale by which the cartographer drew the routes on the Selden map. His reputation outlives his tormentors. The vindication is a small one, but among the people I hang out with, this triumph matters. Xiang was one of our finest, and this is what we do.
An engaging narrative supplemented with 16 pages of color illustrations, Mr. Selden’s Map of China will keep any reader who enjoys a good historical detective story eagerly turning the pages. Consequently, it seems churlish to reveal too many of the author’s painstakingly teased-out solutions to the codes and puzzles of this singular chart. I will confirm that Brook concludes that the panicked, debt-ridden Chinese merchant who reluctantly surrendered the scroll to the “englishe comander” probably did so in the Javan trading center of Bantam.
But in signs of a lively emerging debate, Robert Batchelor, the American scholar who first spotted the map, sees evidence in its northern portions for an origin there, perhaps in the Japanese port of Hirado, where the great China Captain Li Dan set in motion a chain of events that led indirectly to a Chinese Taiwan.
Whether Selden’s long-forgotten map has anything to say about certain contested archipelagos, if it might in any way prove a “winning card in the diplomatic game China plays with its neighbors,” remains for the reader to learn.
Editor's note: The Selden Map and Laud Rutter are on exhibit at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum until 23 June, the first time in four hundred years these items have been returned to China.