Book review: Mr Selden's Map of China, by Timothy Brook

by Timothy Brook
Profile Books
3 stars
Kit Gillet

In 2009, scholars at Oxford University found themselves looking down at an ancient Chinese map that hadn't been seen for almost a century.

The one-metre by two-metre watercolour, an exquisite depiction of the South China Sea and the lands around it, defied convention: it was clearly Chinese, since all of the markings on it were in Chinese characters, yet it positioned China as simply another landmass around the central focus of the sea.

The map was marked with lines that obviously represented Asian shipping trade routes, but also seemed to employ aspects of European cartography.

It had somehow made its way to England, where it had then spent almost 400 years being largely ignored in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was a beautiful mystery, and one that China scholar Timothy Brook felt compelled to delve into.

In Mr Selden's Map of China, Brook attempts to get to the bottom of how and when the map was made, by whom, and, perhaps most intriguingly, how it ended up in the hands of John Selden, a mediocre poet but one of the leading legal brains of 17th-century Britain.