Sailing from China - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 114

that ran south and branched out to the ports of South-East Asia. In practice, the
EasternandWesternSearoutesmetupinJava,atthebottomendofthegreatcircle
they traced around the South China Sea. That leaves Beiyang, the Northern Sea,
the routes connecting coastal China northwards to Japan. Zhang Xie shows less in-
terest in the Northern Sea route, so instead of dignifying it as an equal member of
Ming China's navigational system alongside the Eastern and Western Seas, he re-
legates the routes to Japan as an appendix at the end of the topic. Our tour of the
Selden map starts there.
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TheSeldenmapshowstheNorthernSearouteheadingawayfromChinaona shen-
mao bearing of 85°. It then divides into two routes. One runs directly to Kyushu: a
straight shot on a genyin bearing of 55° that ends at the Goto Archipelago, a string
of five larger islands and dozens of smaller ones off the west coast of Kyushu, at
the south end of Japan. This was the most direct route linking China to Japan.
A more convoluted route was also available that took ships out to the Ryukyu
Islands, achain ofislands ofwhich the largest andthe best knownis Okinawa. Ry-
ukyu was an independent kingdom that sent tribute to the Ming, although in fact
it was under the domination of Japanese lords based in Kyushu. This route heads
away from the Fujian coast in a series of six segments that starts on a chen (120°)
bearing until it fluctuates between yimao (95°) and mao (90°) as the route picks its
way through the southern end of the chain. The cartographer has drawn the islands
without any apparent knowledge of their disposition. The Senkaku or Diaoyu Is-
lands, over which China and Japan are currently in noisy public dispute, may be
among the lumps of rock that dot the East China Sea between Taiwan and Ok-
inawa, but it would be facetious to suggest that the Selden map can be used to jus-
tify anyone's claim to anything in this part of the ocean. The route then runs due
north on a zi (360°) bearing and then shifts to guichou (25°). As it approaches a
cluster of islands labelled Yegu Passage, the cartographer inserts a note warning
aboutthefast-moving eastward current (nowknownastheKuroshioCurrent). The
course is then reset on a yin bearing (60°), turns 5° to genyin (55°) until it comes
to the southern end of Japan, then zigzags up the east coast of Kyushu to terminate
at a port labelled Hyogo. Adverse weather stranded Richard Cocks in Hyogo on
Christmas day 1618. In his diary entry for this incident he notes that he was half a
day beyond the outer bar of Osaka harbour. This enables us to identify Hyogo as
today's Kobe, one of Japan's main sea terminals.