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emperor signed an edict slashing the funds for 'anti-Japanese defence boats' in
1614, it became even more so. The emperor of 'all within the four seas' was not
willing to fund the dominion over the seas adjacent to his realm, in complete con-
trast to James I - whom Ben Jonson similarly dignified as 'lord of the four seas' -
whoimagineddominionoverhis,andcouldcallonJohnSeldentosupplythelegal
arguments for it.
What the fourth secret, the shrinking of the South China Sea, tells us is that al-
though the Selden map was drawn from the water, it was not drawn to demonstrate
any claims of sovereignty over what lay out in the ocean. It was simply a sea chart
showing merchants where to go.
____________________
Thefirstquestionanyonewouldaskaboutthemapis,whodrewit?Thisisasecret
we won't be able to unlock. Our cartographer has vanished. The closest we will
get is in unravelling two other secrets: where and when he drew it. Let's start with
the where. In his will John Selden states unequivocally that his map was 'made
there'.Thereasonableassumptionisthat'there'meansChina,althoughhowwould
Selden have known? The language of the labels, as also the use of a prefabricated
China map, supposes Chinese authorship, so the cartographer was indeed Chinese,
but did he have to be in China to draw it? Is it possible that he was somewhere
else?
Consider the places about which he appears to have local knowledge and those
ofwhichhedoesn't.Wecanstartbyrulingoutthebadlydrawnbits,suchasJapan,
where Nagasaki is Longzishaji - the Langasaque of European lingo. If we move
ourgazedowntothePhilippines,weseethatManilaisvividlydrawn,plusawhole
string of place-names down the west side of Luzon. Luzon is good. However,
everything to the south is a complete muddle. These were not routes he knew per-
sonally.
To my mind, the part of the map that feels most geographically informed is its
southern half. I have already noted that Ming maps abbreviate South-East Asia so
radically that it sometimes disappears entirely. The Selden map does South-East
Asia like no Chinese map before it and none after it for two centuries. If I had to
put the Selden cartographer somewhere, Iwould put him all the way downstage on
Java,either inBantam orJakarta. Bantam wasthemajor trading site forEuropeans
arriving in these waters in the sixteenth century. Chinese knew it as Sunda, the
name of the regional sultanate, and this is how it is labelled on the Selden map.
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