Secrets of the Selden Map - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 152

was so good that it obviated the need for detailed astral knowledge, though that I
doubt. Every pilot accumulates just as much knowledge as he can to assure safe
passage. How the night sky mattered I cannot say, but perhaps it prompted our car-
tographer to choose the map he did. *
Constellations aren't the only heavenly bodies marked on the Selden map. The
sun and the moon are also depicted, twice. One pair is directly north of Beijing:
a red sun and a white moon each labelled with its Chinese character. They are re-
peated more prominently in the two top corners. A red sun sits in the right and a
white moon in the left, both draped by auspicious wisps of multicoloured cloud.
We can tell that Michael Shen pointed them out to Thomas Hyde, for the latter has
written on them their Latin names, sol and luna . Pairing the sun and moon was a
popular Ming device that came to an abrupt finish at the end of the dynasty. They
show up as shoulder patches on the robes of the Ming emperors in the fifteenth
century, for example, and they were used as a decorative insignia on tombstones.
Sun and moon were understood to be the most powerful of the celestial bodies, so
drawing them on the map was a device for invoking the protective power of the
cosmos over the routes that sailors travelled.
Theremaybeasortofpuninvolvedheretoo.Whenyoucombinethecharacters
for sun on the right and moon on the left into a single character, you get the word
ming , 'light' - the name of the dynasty. Was the Selden cartographer acknow-
ledging the dynasty - not the place called China but the time called the Ming? If
so, then had the map remained in Asia, it would not have survived the Manchu
conquest in 1644. At that moment every sign of the Ming had to be expunged. The
patches were torn from the shoulders of imperial robes, the talismans gouged from
tombstones, andall otherimages ofthesunandmoonmade todisappear asthough
they had never been there.
So the first secret is just that China isn't the way it appears, and that the map
isn't really about China anyway. Not much, but it's a start.
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The second secret of the Selden map is what will explain its stunning accuracy.
Lay the map beside a contemporary rendering such as John Speed's Asia with the
Islands Adjoining Described engraved in 1626 and it comes off well (Fig. 22). Put
it beside a modern conical projection (the Asia North Lambert Conformal Conic
Projection, to be technical) - turn to the second appendix for this exercise - and
it still holds up. Map historian Cordell Yee observed two decades ago that 'scale