Mr Selden’s map of China

The Historie of Tithes (1618) was notable for its modern historical methodology, being grounded on manuscript sources and providing a full bibliography so that readers could verify the evidence for themselves. The book annoyed clergy because of its secular approach, demolishing the divine right of tithes, and was suppressed by the privy council.[3] He served as MP for Lancaster (1623), Great Bedwyn (1626), Ludgershall (1628), and in the Long Parliament of 1640 for the University of Oxford. His legal knowledge made him useful to the opposition to Charles I, when debates often turned on precedents. In 1626 he opposed the royal favourite, the Duke of Buckingham (1592-1628), and he collaborated closely with Sir Thomas Coke (1552-1634) in 1628 on habeas corpus. He was imprisoned by two successive kings, by James VI for five weeks in 1621 and by Charles I between 1629 and 1631. He left public life following Pride's Purge in 1649 but continued to publish learned works until his death on 30 November 1654. His long-time companion, the countess of Kent, pre-deceased him by three years. The Selden Society was founded in his honour in 1886 to encourage the study of English law.
The 'Selden map', dating from around 1608 (p 173), entered the Bodleian Library, probably in 1659, possibly in 1655, as part of a large donation of books and manuscripts from the Selden estate (pp 11, 19, 21), the largest single bequest the library has ever received. The 'most important Chinese map of the last seven centuries', the chart depicts 'the slice of the world that Chinese at that time knew, from the Indian Ocean in the west to the Spice Islands in the east and from Java in the south to Japan in the north' (page xx). The treasure, restored in 2011, is currently on display at the Bodleian; valued for insurance purposes at around four million pounds, it would probably yield even more at auction (page xxii).
It is said that 'nothing certain' is known about the map (page xxiii), which seems to be wide of the mark; perhaps 'before I [Professor Brook] started to examine it' should be understood. For a start, it is unique. It covers more space beyond China than any Ming map usually showed, stretching from Japan to Sumatra; the heart of the map was not China, but the South China Sea, which was the zone for the spice trade; and the map also looked too familiar and too modern, in that it depicted how East Asia would be seen cartographically today rather than at the time of the Ming dynasty. Other distinguishing features are the 'compass rose', the distance scale, and an 'empty bordered rectangle drawn to one side', which do not appear on any other known Chinese map (pp 87-8). Painted on paper by a person unknown, the artefact measures sixty-three inches by thirty-eight (pp xx-xxi), rendering it the largest wall map of its time and place. The object is 'a thing of considerable if subtle beauty, wallpapering the land mass of eastern Asia with mountains, trees and flowering plants', and the 'occasional whimsical detail', such as butterflies fluttering about in the Gobi Desert (page xxi). It is assumed that the cartographer was a man (page xxi): 'The man who drew the map acknowledged long-established traditions of how to draw China, but he also stepped outside that tradition to picture the lands that lay beyond China in a fashion no other Chinese cartographer had ever done'.
The 'Selden map', known thus because it lacks any caption of its own (p 13), is featured in plate 1 between pages 72 and 73, and in schematic form at plate 13; Selden himself appears in illustrations 3 and 6 there. The author uses the map as a peg on which 'to explore the age in which it was made', an age of 'remarkable creativity and change' (page xxii).
Professor Timothy James Brook (b 1951), is an eminent Canadian sinologist who took his BA at the University of Toronto, before moving to Harvard for his AM (1977) and PhD (1984). He was awarded a D.Litt (honoris causa) by the University of Warwick in 2010 and has been garlanded with many other academic prizes, such as the 2010 Prix Auguste Pavie. After serving his apprenticeship at the universities of Alberta (1984-6) and Toronto (1986-97), he held professorships successively at Stanford (1997-9), Toronto (1999-2004), and British Columbia (since 2004), with an interlude (2007-9) as Shaw Professor of Chinese at Oxford. His many books include Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (2008), which has been published in translation in Brazil, China, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Korea, and Taiwan. He has also edited six volumes of the History of Imperial China (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007-2010), the fifth of which is his own study of The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (2010). He co-edited with Bob Tadashi Wakabayashi, Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839-1952 (2000). Besides his numerous books, he is a prolific contributor of book chapters, journal articles, and reviews.
The highways and byways of Brook's study include England under the Stuart monarchy, when Selden collected the map and the Bodleian librarian (Thomas Hyde) annotated it; the seas around China during the Ming dynasty, when Chinese and European mariners were building networks of trade that wove the region into a single system of sea routes; and the more particular history to which the Selden map must belong, the history of charts and maps leading up to the time of its creation.
In so doing, Brook solves most of the mysterious aspects of the affair, detecting (for example) that the 'stunningly accurate' Selden map is not really about China, and, indeed, is not really a map at all, but a chart of sea-routes, with the landforms as approximate afterthoughts; it was simply a sea chart showing merchants where to go (pp 162, 169). Professor Brook thinks that the part of the map that feels most geographically informed is its southern half; and he deduces that it was probably produced, not in China itself but at Bantam (Java), and that it was acquired by John Saris from a Chinese merchant there around 1608. It is probable that Selden acquired the map via Richard Hakluyt (d 1616) and Samuel Purchas (1577-1626), but definite evidence is lacking (pp 170-2). The one question which Professor Brook was unable to solve is the identity of the person who drew the map.

AVM Horton, Bordesley, Worcestershire, United Kingdom (avmhorton@hotmail.com)

Citation: Horton, AVM. 2016. Review of  Brook, T. 2015. Mr Selden's Map of China: The Spice Trade, a Lost Chart and the South China Sea, posted on New Asia Books on 22 Feb 2016; newbooks.asia/review/mr-selden’s-map-china

[1] Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

[2] Irwin, R. 2006. The Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and their Enemies. London: Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books, p95.

[3] See Denise Thomas, 'Religious Polemic, Print Culture, and Pastoral Ministry: Thomas Hall B.D. (1610-1665) and the promotion of Presbyterian Orthodoxy in the English Revolution', PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, May 2011, p186.