Heaven is Round, Earth is Square - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 127

7
Heaven is Round, Earth is Square
In 1625 Samuel Purchas gave English readers their first maps of China. Today
his name means nothing to most people, unless you happen to be an aficionado
of seventeenth-century travel literature. In his own day, though, his collections of
travellers' tales were everyone's favourite recreational reading, and his name be-
came one ofthe best-known in the world ofpopular publishing. The booksbearing
his name were still going strong in 1798, when Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously
fell asleep over a passage on page 472 of Purchas his Pilgrimage - 'In Xamdu did
Cublai Can build a stately Palace, encompassing sixteene miles of plaine ground
with a wall, … and in the middest thereof a sumptuous house of pleasure' - and
awoke to write one of the most famous poems in the English language:
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea. …
Purchas his Pilgrimage was Samuel Purchas's first book, and a bestseller. The
title made Purchas a brand name, and he used it to advantage by devoting the
next ten years of his life to bringing out new editions, and then compiling in five
volumes the even more massive bestseller, Purchas his Pilgrimes (Fig. 18). His
biographer declares it to be 'the largest book ever seen through the English press'.
To get the materials he needed to fill his books, Purchas turned to friends and ac-
quaintances,amongthemJohnSelden.Thetwomenhadmuchincommon.Neither
hademinent families ornobleconnections -Purchas'sfather wasinthecloth trade
- yet both found their way in literary London on the strength of their intelligence,
determination and whatever connections they made at university (Selden at Ox-
ford, Purchas at Cambridge). The older of the two decided to make a safe living
as a vicar, the younger a less stable career in law, but neither wasted all that much
effort on his career. Their enthusiasms lay elsewhere.