What’s Wrong with this Map? - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 8

sovereignty by right of discovery. Chinese mariners first discovered the islands in
the South China Sea, this argument goes, and this makes all these islands and the
entire ocean surrounding them China's. The legal Latin term for this sort of claim
is terra nullius , which is to say, 'the land belongs to no one and therefore is mine
because I found it first'. This is the historic claim that Europeans made all over the
globe from 1492 onwards justifying conquest. Most such lands were far from nul-
lius at the time Europeans arrived, but European law simply declared the existing
inhabitants to be savages and therefore without a state capable of exercising sover-
eignty. There may have been people there, but the land didn't belong to them.
Terra nullius is still available as a legal claim, although there remains almost
nothing left on the globe to which this claim could be made. Should China ever at-
tempttofieldthisclaimininternational arbitration, itwouldfacesomedifficulties.
Yes,thesetinybitsofterrawerenullius,buttheclaimalsorequiresoccupation,and
these islands were never occupied until China built airstrips in the ocean contigu-
ous to a few of them. Yes, Chinese sources from the fourteenth century indicate an
awarenessofthetinyislandsintheSouthChinaSea,butisthisevidenceofdiscov-
ery, or simply of recording what everyone in the region already knew?
At issue is the dignity of states that feel under-dignified. But even more at issue
isthepromiseofunderseaoilbeds.Noonecaresabouttheislands.Theycareabout
what's under them. And so Wang Wei fell to his death.
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Seven years later I was in the basement of the New Bodleian Library poring over
something the very existence of which I could not have imagined. It lay unrolled
before me across two tables that had been pushed together: an old Chinese paper
map of the eastern end of Asia. Its size was remarkable, over a metre wide and
almost two metres long. The roller at the bottom showed that it was at one time
hung on a wall. Hand-drawn in black ink, it depicted the coasts of China and the
islands of South-East Asia. The map itself presented an extraordinary panorama.
The land was the colour of pale sand, decorated with mountains painted in pale
blue and brown, dotted with black ink to suggest trees in the style of Chinese land-
scape painting and ticked out with tiny blotches of red. Vegetation ran riot across
the map - ferns and stands of bamboo, pine trees and elms, irises and aspidistras,
even a few orchids. The ocean was flooded in an uneven greenish wash - it would
have been blue before the copper pigment oxidised - patterned with cloud-like bil-
lows suggesting waves. The cities and ports dotting the map bore labels written in