Mr. Selden's Map of China by Timothy Brook: review
The efforts of Western navigators and merchants to reach China during the 15th and 16th centuries is explored through an old map.
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Timothy Brook is passionate about Chinese history. He has written many books on the topic, mostly about the Ming Dynasty which ruled China from the mid-1330s to the mid-1600s.
Brook, a professor of history at the University of British Columbia, has offered Sinophiles another book, Mr. Selden’s Map of China, examining the effort of early European Renaissance explorers to make contact with the Chinese for trade purposes.
Selden’s map was bequeathed to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in roughly 1659 by John Selden, a lawyer and politician. It is uncertain who the cartographer was but the map is very large and illustrated with trees, flowers and mountains.
Selden lived during the last gasp of the English Renaissance, under the rule of James I, and he was friends with poet John Donne, the playwright Ben Jonson and he may, as a young man, even have met Shakespeare. He was arrested several times over criticisms about the rights of kings, however, his intelligence and grasp of many languages — Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Persian and Turkish — made him too valuable a commodity to imprison for any lengthy period of time.
Selden’s map is a significant step in the development of the law of the sea, an important issue of the day since the English, Dutch, Spanish and others were sailing far distances to buy spices or precious jewels.
Should they be allowed to sail freely around international waters or were seas and oceans owned by the rulers whose lands abutted the water? Those were some of the issues considered by officials developing rules for the law of the sea. We discuss similar issues today.
Brook offers many fascinating characters in his book including Michael Shen, a Chinese man who was converted to Christianity by Jesuits. Shen was able to offer knowledge of Confucius and he became part of James I’s court.
Brook also talks about William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury, a collector of Oriental manuscripts. Laud had ties to Selden who admired him for his work as Chancellor of Oxford. But the Archbishop was eventually executed by the Puritans, after the fall of the Stuarts.
Mr. Selden’s Map of China offers an interesting perspective on Chinese- European relations in the 16th and 17th centuries. The reading, however, can get ponderous.
In the chapter called Reading Chinese in Oxford, Brook describes the perimeter of Selden’s map with additions from Michael Shen and the Orientalist Thomas Hyde:
“Michael has repeated the three syllables hung mao chi, to which Hyde has added translations, although the only word still legible is ‘capillus’, meaning ‘hair’ for mao. Hyde has written hung=mao again below this, connecting the two syllables, as Michael never does, with his character double hypen (=), and he has added a translation: ‘Hollanders’.”
I won’t go on. Had Brook not offered so many minute details and digressions, his story would have been more enjoyable. He could have used appendices at the back of the book if he wanted to expand his explanations. But Brook is an academic. Sometimes they just can’t help themselves.
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