Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
5
The Compass Rose
The strangest thing on the Selden map is the compass rose. It sits dead centre in
the space above the Great Wall directly north of Beijing. Willow trees in Mongo-
lia improbably droop their branches over it, and a flowering plum tree blossoms
just as improbably to the west (Fig. 10). There is nothing strange about the actu-
al compass. It is the standard Chinese version with twenty-four spokes, each with
its directional name. It is a little odd that the Selden cartographer has inserted the
word for 'compass',
luojing
, in the small circle in the middle, as though the image
somehow required a label. (And it is indeed the cartographer's hand, not Michael
Shen's.) No, what really makes the compass strange is that it shouldn't be there.
Chinese maps never include a compass rose: none before the Selden map has one,
and none after, until the European style took over in the twentieth century.
Thecompassroseismadestrangerbyitstwocompanions,arulerbeneathitand
an empty bordered rectangle drawn to one side. The ruler appears to represent one
Chinese foot (
fen
), for it is graduated in units of ten inches (
cun
) and a hundred
tenths(
fen
).Itisnotclearwhetherthisfootisbeingusedasascale.AChinesefoot
at the end of the Ming dynasty measured a little under 32 cm, whereas the ruler
on the map measures 37.5 cm. In any case, Chinese maps never include a meas-
urement scale. According to convention, neither the ruler nor the compass belongs
here, yet here it is. And what are we to make of the empty rectangle? It looks like
thesortofframeyoumightputaroundatitle,butthatisn'tsomethingChinesecar-
tographers did. When they gave titles to maps, they put them in a band across the
top rather than intrude them into the space of the map. Occasionally they might
insert a colophon to explain something - and in fact the Selden map has one such
colophonontheleft-handside,whichwewillgettoinduecourse-butitisalways
boxed by a single line, not a double.
If none of these three things naturally belongs on a Chinese map, then what are
they doing here?
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