Sailing from China - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 113

erated in the shifting matrix of channels and sand bars choking the mouth of Nine
DragonRiver.Theshallowsimpededthebiggerjunksfromgettingtoshore,which
meantoffloadingcargoontolighters.Whateverdisadvantagethatamountedtowas
more than offset by Moon Harbour's political advantage: it had a customs house.
Collectingtaxwasaracketthatspilledmoneyinalldirections,mostconspicuously
to the imperial household itself, but it gave the harbour imperial clearance for for-
eign trade. It was the edge Moon Harbour needed to go from being a tough seaport
where you wouldn't walk alone in the daylight, let alone at night, to being the al-
pha and omega of an entire network of ports through which Chinese goods were
exported to South-East Asia, Europe and the Americas.
TheprevaricatoramongoursourcesistheSeldenmap.Lookcloselyattheroute
lines running in the Taiwan Strait. You will see that they jut in and converge on a
node. The right-hand line, which connects to the route running north-east up the
coast, is marked shenmao , 85°; the left-hand line, which leads to the route head-
ing south-west, is labeled dingwei , 205°. Between these two is a third line, which
hooks in the Taiwan Strait and then heads to Manila on a constant bearing of bing ,
165°. None of these lines is drawn so that it touches the coast. All three routes
connect offshore, and a dot marks the spot: this is the point from which Ming Ch-
ina's maritime trading network radiated out into the world, the starting point of the
Selden map (Fig. 16). Moon Harbour is not labelled, nor is Quanzhou's port, and
indeed the small scale of the map rules out including either. The cartographer thus
avoids giving either Zhangzhou or Quanzhou priority. In a sense, it doesn't matter.
At this scale, both could be used as the port of embarkation. The map thus accords
witheithertheLaudrutterorZhangXie'sbook:noreasontochoosebetweenthem.
Just as important as that starting dot for understanding the Selden map are the
three paths of exit into the Taiwan Strait, for each of these is the initial strand of
three distinct webs of routes going in those three directions. This is not easy to
detect when first glancing at the map, but scholar Zhang makes the tripartite divi-
sion of routes crystal clear in his book. In fact, they furnish him with the system
by which he has organised his route data. Ming Chinese knew what we call the
South China Sea as Nanyang, Southern Sea. With that term taken, Zhang still had
the three other cardinal directions to work with, and these he uses to distinguish
three different zones of travel from Ming China's south-east coast. Two of them
are announced in the title of his book, Dong xi yang kao . Dongyang, the Eastern
Sea, denoted the chain of routes that headed east to the Philippines and then turned
south to the Spice Islands. Xiyang, the Western Sea, was the sequence of routes