Mapping China: A cartographer’s dream; Two books tell the fascinating tale of a rediscovered map of China

Mapping China: A cartographer’s dream; Two books tell the fascinating tale of a rediscovered map of China

Jan 18th 2014 | From the print edition

Mr Selden’s Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer. By Timothy Brook.Bloomsbury USA; 240 pages; $25. Profile Books; £18.99. Buy from Amazon.com,Amazon.co.uk

London: The Selden Map and the Making of a Global City, 1549-1689. By Robert Batchelor. University of Chicago Press; 344 pages; $45. Buy fromAmazon.com

MAPS can be tools for trade, but they can also be weapons of war; for centuries cartographers have embraced both aims. Nowhere has captivated the minds of Western mapmakers as much as fabled Cathay. Finding a sea route to China inspired many of the great explorers. European maps of the past 400 years tell the story of empire and the efforts to prise China open for trade. In the 19th century the navigators finally succeeded.

Chinese leaders are now flexing their own cartographic muscles. In November last year they issued a map showing a new Chinese “air defence identification zone” that includes the airspace around some disputed islands, owned by Japan which calls them the Senkakus and claimed by China which named them the Diaoyus.

The map of the Chinese defence zone may have raised some wry smiles in Oxford University’s Bodleian Library. For the Bodleian houses a special map of China, bequeathed in 1654 by an English lawyer, John Selden (pictured). The map was probably drawn by a Chinese cartographer in Java around 1610, when China was still the world’s biggest economy and Europeans longed to trade there. It came into Selden’s possession through an English sea captain. During the first half of the 17th century, it was the most accurate chart of Asia in the world; clearly marked upon it are some of the disputed islands.

Selden’s map is a work of art. It is also different from any that had come out of China before. Unlike imperial maps before it, and after, China itself is not in the middle. The map views Asia from the sea and not from the land, so the South China Sea is at the centre. It is a traders’ map and the merchant routes through Asia are marked with lines criss-crossing the seas. The disputed islands were not so much objects of desire as of danger. They were surrounded by reefs that could take any ship to the bottom and were to be avoided.

The map presents a different story from the one that is frequently told of 17th-century China—of a culture in isolation, cut off from the rest of the world. Even more surprising, then, that the map could have been put in a drawer in the Bodleian more than a century ago and not seen again until an American academic, Robert Batchelor, discovered it in 2008. One of those who saw it next was another historian, Timothy Brook. Now both men have written books about it.

Mr Brook is best known for his tale of early globalisation, “Vermeer’s Hat”. He calls the Selden map “the most important Chinese map of the last seven centuries”. His book, though, as he admits, is not really about the map itself, but about “the people whose stories intersected with it”. King James II is there, witnessing a food fight at the Bodleian in 1687. Ben Jonson appears. So, too, does Shen Fuzong, a Catholic convert and the first Chinese man to visit Oxford. The story is full of Chinese pirates and English adventurers.

Most fascinating of all, though, is Selden himself. The son of a Sussex farmer, he rose to become London’s foremost lawyer and his legal contributions still resonate. In 1619 he wrote a treatise called Mare Clausum (“The Closed Sea”), in which he argued that countries had jurisdiction over the sea close to their shore. The work was in response to a similar treatise, Mare Liberum (“The Open Sea”), written in 1609 by a Dutchman called Huig de Groot, which had argued the opposite, that the seas were open to anyone. The international law of the sea used today, including the concept of 12 miles of territorial waters (an extension of Selden’s original three miles) is based on the two men’s works.

Nowhere does the Selden map state that the disputed islands belong to China or Japan, and Mr Brook, wisely, does not try to use the map to solve the question of sovereignty. Instead, he weaves a wonderful tale of the interaction of peoples of a different age in lands where sovereignty was barely a concept. From Quanzhou and Java and Nagasaki back to Oxford and London, he describes people trying to understand each other before they had the intellectual and linguistic tools to do so.

Mr Batchelor’s book is more academic in research and in tone, but no less fascinating. In it he shows how the skein of shipping routes on the Selden map were connected with the rise of London as a global city. If there were a northern European city that might have aspired to be global in the 1540s, it would more probably have been Antwerp. And yet the hub of the English wool and cloth trade on the edge of Europe would, by the 1700s, become the centre of the world. Mr Batchelor argues that, even more than the much-documented Atlantic trade, it was interaction with Asia along the lines traced upon the Selden map that brought London into modernity. Now, after centuries of European dominance, the map has emerged from its hibernation into a world whose order is being reversed once again.