The Compass Rose - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 94

frombeforetheeighteenth century,andofmerchant tradingfirms,noneatall.This
is why we cannot name a single Ming pilot. They did not write about themselves,
and they remained off the radar screen of those who kept public records.
But there is one man who so loved the sea that he set himself the task of gath-
ering every scrap of information about ships, routes, compasses, piloting and the
tricks and technologies of sailing, all of which he compiled into a book he finished
in 1617 and may have published the following year. Zhang Xie was neither a pilot
noraship'scaptain.Hisearlypathdidnotpointhimtowardsthesea.Likeanyoth-
er son of a family that could afford to sacrifice his labour, he had to study for the
examinations that led to the civil service and a career in the imperial bureaucracy.
His course through the thickets of Confucian texts and examinations was set for
him. It started in the local county school in his home town of Zhangzhou, the most
southerlyprefecturalcapitalinFujianprovince;itwentnorthtotheprovincialcap-
ital, Fuzhou; and beyond that it stretched as a bright but crowded road that ended
in Beijing. Zhang got to Fuzhou and earned the degree of juren , Recommendee, in
1594. But the path to Beijing proved too narrow and difficult for him to rise to the
top degree of jinshi , Presented Scholar. The provincial degree became the ceiling
throughwhichhecouldnotbreak.Itwassufficienttoqualifyforapostlowerdown
inthe civil service, perhaps as acounty vice-magistrate, butinadequate tocompete
with the Presented Scholars.
Oneancestorfourgenerationsupanotherbranchofthefamilyhadrisenthrough
theexamsystemandthecivilservicetobecomeavice-minister,butnodescendant
of his was able to match that record. Zhang Xie's father, Zhang Tingbang, had
earned the title of Recommendee in 1572. That had been sufficient for him to be
appointed as a county magistrate. He did well enough to earn a promotion to vice-
prefect, but his unwillingness to fawn over the prefect got him fired in his early
thirties. That was the end of his career in the civil service. Zhang Tingbang had
to go home to Zhangzhou. All we know of his subsequent life in enforced retire-
ment appears in a brief biographical notice in a Fujian miscellany. The biography
records that he had a residence on the west side of the stateliest Buddhist temple in
the city, which he called the Hall of Stylish Elegance, and that he converted it into
a clubhouse for a poetry society in 1601. It also tells us that he liked boats, for he
ended up living on a houseboat, spending the rest of his life afloat on the rivers of
his native place.
We shouldn't read too much into given names, but names do have meanings.
Tingbang means 'court proclamation', Xie means 'harmony'. If ever two names