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almost the exact same set of place-names, even captions. It also turns provincial
boundaries into river-like shapes, and it merges Hainan Island into the south coast.
Now for the telling detail, Xanadu. Just as the Selden map marks the old
Jurchen/Mongol capital, there it is on the Yu and Zhang maps. They give the
label the shape of a water drop; but like the gourd on the Selden map, this shape
is reserved for this one place-name. This may seem like a minor detail, but it
shows these maps to be pebbles in the same cartographic stream. This is why Col-
eridge deserved a nod in the previous chapter. Selden led me to his friend Purchas,
Purchasledmetohislatter-dayreaderColeridge,ColeridgeledmetoXanadu,and
Xanadu led me to Zhang Huang and Yu Xiangdou. It was an odd sequence, but
without Coleridge's dream-poem I might never have noticed what was going on.
TheimportantdifferencebetweentheYumapandtheSeldenmapisnotintheir
details but in their frames. Yu employs the standard square format: a few place-
name labels float in the ocean, but otherwise China fills the frame. Non-China
barely appears. In the Selden map China is a component of a larger zone. It is also
so visually distinct from the rest of the visual field in which it sits that, to me, it
looksasthoughourcartographerhastakensomethingliketheFujianalmanacmap,
stripped off its frame and slotted it into the larger map like a sort of prefabricated
unit to fill in the space where China is required. In other words, China does not
anchor this map, which is what we might expect China to do when a Chinese map-
maker holds the pen. Instead, our cartographer has filled the space with a map he
copied from elsewhere, without any serious attempt to integrate the rest of his map
into it. Inserting one map into another suggests to me that he wasn't particularly
interested in China. This is because the coasts mattered, not the interior.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that the bog-standard version of China on the
Selden map is nothing more than decorative filler. Perhaps the Selden cartograph-
er chose it out of an interest in the stars, given the importance of stars for night
navigation. The sun's position in the daytime sky was a very blunt instrument for
navigatingtheopenoceancomparedwiththeinfinityofastralpositionsthatmoved
through the night sky. Unfortunately, there is little in the documents of Chinese
navigation from which to reconstruct that interest. The section on reading the stars
in the Laud rutter is extremely brief, consisting only of the eight compass points at
whichfournamedconstellationsriseandset.Surelyapilotwouldcommandarich-
er repertoire of astral readings than that. Perhaps it was information that was trans-
mitted only by word of mouth, embargoed knowledge that no pilot would want to
committopublicrecord.WecouldalsospeculatethatChinesecompassknowledge
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