Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Chinese characters, circled in black ink and edged in yellow. And crisscrossing the
ocean from port to port was a tracery of ruler-straight lines showing the courses
that ships once sailed - the first map in history to do so on this scale. I was famil-
iar with Asian maps, but I had never seen anything like it. It was beautiful, it was
unique:ahistoricaldocument,aworkofartandamindscape(toborrowtheperfect
term from map historian Cordell Yee) of how someone once imagined the Asian
world looked. Far more than a dry transcription of topographical facts, it animated
an entire world. It was perfect.
I was looking at the map that day because David Helliwell had sent me a mes-
sage earlier that morning suggesting I come over to the library as soon as possible.
David has overseen the Chinese collection at the Bodleian Library for as long as
I have been a historian of China, so I knew that anything that excited or surprised
him would be worth a look. Something significant had come to light. As soon as I
had finished my morning's teaching, I hurried over and found David in his office.
He took me down to the basement, where access was restricted, and there lay the
map.
The Bodleian is the library of the University of Oxford. It is named after Tho-
masBodley,whoproposedtotheuniversitythatitshouldhavealibrarylikeallthe
great universities on the Continent, and that he would build it from the remnants
of the manuscript collection stored in a hall over the Divinity School. The library
was officially founded in 1602, and two years later Bodley accessioned his first
Chinese book. No one in England could make head or tail of a Chinese book, quite
literally: the Chinese convention of turning pages from left to right rather than, as
Europeansdid,fromrighttoleftgeneratedconfusionoverwhichwasthebackcov-
er of a Chinese book and which the front, to say nothing of which was the top and
whichthebottom.ButignoranceofthelanguagedidnotdeterBodleyfromcollect-
ing Chinese topics when these became available, or topics in any indecipherable
language. It didn't matter that his library possessed topics without readers. He was
confident that some day someone would know how to read them, and that some
day something useful in them would come to light. There was no hurry. The topics
could sit quietly on shelves or in boxes until the time came when they might be of
use. Bodley was collecting for the long term.
David had already checked the records and could tell me that the map had
entered the Bodleian Library in 1659 as part of a large donation of topics and
manuscripts from the estate of a lawyer named John Selden, someone of whom I
had never heard. Beyond that, he knew nothing. All he could add was that the map
Search WWH ::
Custom Search