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formedtodrawupchargesagainstthearchbishop,althoughhemayhavebeenable
tododgewhatwouldhavebeenforhimanunpleasantduty.WhenLaudwasfinally
put on trial three years later, Selden helped him by furnishing historical documents
that he requested for his defence. But he had no power to stop the train of events
from leading where it did: to Laud's execution the following January. Selden did
not agree with Laud's views, but he agreed less that executing him could ever be
regarded as a legal act of justice.
Laud fervently believed in the importance of learning and of preserving know-
ledge for the future, even if he was not himself a scholar. And so he was an active
chancellor, raising funds, financing buildings, funding Oxford's first lectureship in
Arabic and arranging donations to the Bodleian Library. He was a major donor
himself, giving the library over a thousand manuscripts. A quarter of these were in
Orientallanguages,includingChinese.AsLaudwrotein1634,suchmaterialscon-
tained 'a great deale of Learning and that very fitt and necessary to be knowne';
without them, he complained, 'very few [students spend] any of theyr time to at-
tainetoskilleitherin[Arabic]orotherEasterneLanguages'.Hewasdeterminedto
mend this lapse. And so a Chinese manuscript, the contents of which were entirely
inscrutable to him, found its way into the Bodleian Library.
____________________
The Laud rutter is not a working pilot's manual. It is a copy of one, edited into
its present form by an anonymous editor who acquired the original but who, like
Zhang Xie, decided to clean it up. In his preface the Laud editor makes the con-
ventional claim that the method of direction-finding using a compass was invented
by the Duke of Zhou, a much-mythologised regent in the early years of the Zhou
dynasty (eleventh century
BC
) who is credited with everything good and noble in
Chinesesociety.Theeditorthenexplainsthatrutterstendtobeajumbleofinform-
ation, some of it written, some of it drawn, much of it inconsistent, so he set him-
self the task of imposing order on it.
What soon becomes apparent as the reader proceeds through the handbook is
that the Laud rutter is based on a record of the routes sailed by the imperial eunuch
Zheng He in the fifteenth century. Zheng was charged by the third Ming emper-
or to go out into the world and inform all states with which China had relations
that a new emperor had ascended the throne (which he did illegally by usurping
power from his nephew, although that was not to be mentioned) and that he ex-
pected them to acknowledge his enthronement by sending tribute. This diplomatic
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