What’s Wrong with this Map? - Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - page 15

each other: that what happens in and above the seas around China has everything
to do with the formation of modern nation-states, the corporatisation of the global
economy and the emergence of international law - the onset of all of which flags
the precise moment when the Selden map came into being.
Today we transit the skies around China more than we sail the seas; but still we
transit, and every time we do, we repeat exactly what so many others have done.
Our ancestors traded and travelled, migrated and thieved, aided and intimidated,
playing along with whoever held all the cards so that a very few could become
pointlessly rich and the rest of us might just survive until morning. The world has
changed much in the intervening four centuries, but we have changed less. If we
have a tiny advantage over our forebears, it is that we can look back, imagine what
might have been and understand what wasn't, and why.
Devoting an entire topic to a single seventeenth-century map gives us the scope
to understand not just a map but the world in which it was drawn. The map is an-
onymous, which prevents me from telling its history in a straightforward way. I
wanttogettoitsorigin,buttheonlyplacefromwhichIcanbeginiswhereitended
up. From there I will move towards China and backwards to the early years of the
seventeenth century in an effort to unlock the secrets of when, where, why and
how this extraordinary map was made. Our first foray takes us to England under
the Stuart monarchy (1603-1714), when the lawyer John Selden collected the map
and the librarian Thomas Hyde annotated it. Our second foray takes us to the seas
around China during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), when Chinese and European
mariners were building networks of trade that wove the region into a single system
of sea routes. Our third foray will take us into the more particular history to which
the Selden map must belong, the history of charts and maps leading up to the time
of its creation. This, then, is our backward course, from those who read the map
to those who acquired it, and to him who made it. With each foray, we will move
closer to unlocking some of the secrets of the Selden map; some, but not all. There
will secrets the map keeps to itself.
____________________
Standing there at the border post, I did begin to wonder how badly my bit of map
smuggling could turn out. There was clearly no way I was going to leave China
with the map. But then, without it there was never really a question of not letting
me leave. It was a stroke of good fortune, not that I was allowed to leave, but that
I kept something much more durable than a sheet of printed paper: a memory. The