What’s Wrong with this Map? - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 11

of the world is necessarily different from what the Ming picture was. This is not
because we get it right and they got it wrong. Their vision and ours arise from two
different ways of seeing, two different systems of transcribing geographical real-
ity onto paper. These two ways shouldn't generate the same image, and yet here
was a Chinese map from four centuries in the past that minimised the differences
intime andstyle that shouldhaverendered themaplessfamiliar thanitwasatfirst
sight. It was just too perfect. Not only that, but its attention to sea routes was too
smoothly suited to the obsessions of our time as China becomes the main supplier
of the world's goods and ships its products all over the world. This map charted
the commercial world as no map, East or West, had done before. It made complete
sense, and yet it made no sense.
That day I learned that it was called the Selden map, it otherwise having no title
caption of its own. I had never heard of John Selden, so the connection with the
donor was initially of no interest to me. That has changed. The map could have
come into anyone's hands, and yet, as I would learn, it came into the hands of one
of the authors of the international law of the sea, and indeed the first to argue that
states could claim jurisdiction over the ocean - the very claim China now makes
over the South China Sea.
The question of state jurisdiction first arose in law in the years immediately fol-
lowing Christopher Columbus's first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean. In 1494 a
papal legate brought together the two emerging maritime nations of Europe, Spain
and Portugal, at the Spanish town of Tordesillas for the purpose of determining
who had claim over which part of the globe. Whatever was terra nullius - land
that no one owned - would be divided between them according to a line drawn
frompoletopole370leagues(1,200nauticalmiles)westoftheCapeVerdeIslands
off the north-west coast of Africa. Everything to the east of that line 'shall belong
to, and remain in the possession of, and pertain forever to' Portugal. So Portugal
got Asia, along with a chunk of Brazil, which its treaty negotiators may or may
not have known jutted out across the line. Everything to the west of the line - the
Americas and the Pacific - 'shall belong to, and remain in the possession of, and
pertainforever'toSpain.Thetreatyalsograntedeachtherightofinnocentpassage
through the other's maritime zone.
Tordesillas was conceived as a boundary treaty to resolve a conflict between
two states sharing adjacent territory and to provide a framework for co-existence
and prevent future conflict. Because it was over water and not land, however, its
ramifications could not be limited to the two of them. Its provisions affected every