All Isles and
Continents (which are indeed but greater Isles) are so seated, that there is
none, but that, from some shore of it, another may be discovered.
John Selden
Historie of Tithes
In 2009 an ancient Chinese map came to light in the Bodleian
Library in Oxford. Timothy Brook, a well known authority on Ming China, was
called in to investigate its provenance and history. Brook noticed that unlike
other maps from Ming China, which usually focus on the land mass of China to
the exclusion of the sea, this map depicted the South China Sea and the coast
lines which surround it: the center of the map was not land, but the void of the
empty sea. Brook also noticed the astonishing accuracy of the distribution and shape
of the many islands in the area, and noticed also a fine tracery of lines
connecting the islands to the mainland. Brook realized that what he was looking
at was a map of trade routes connecting Ming China with the markets of Japan,
the Dutch East Indies and the Spanish Philippines. The only thing known for
sure about the map was that it had been bequeathed to the Bodleian by John
Selden, who specifically mentioned the map in his will as having been given to
him by an English commander who had obtained it ‘there’. The map was the only
object in his vast bequest of documents to be named and described in detail in
the will.
From this observation and slenderest of evidences, and
undaunted by the lack of any other information about the map, Brook sets out to
discover who made it, when, and how it came to be in Mr. Selden’s possession.
Along the way he spins a tale that connects East to West and sheds light on the
dawn of the modern global age. He unearths many interesting things, and gives
to the reader a wealth of fascinating information concerning Mr. Selden, maps,
and the interaction between Europe and China in the seventeenth century.
oooOOOooo
Mr Selden was the most important jurist of the age, at least
in England. Bosom friend of Ben Jonson, student of James Ussher, Selden was
also one of the most distinguished Orientalists of the age, able to read
Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Syriac. We learn many other things about
him. For example, it was Selden, in dialogue with the great Dutch jurist de
Groot, who hammered out the first version of the international law of the sea.
In 1609 de Groot published a book arguing that the sea was mare liberum, open to all, and that no nation could claim jurisdiction
over it. Selden in 1635 published a riposte to de Groot, arguing that the sea
was mare clausum and that nations
could lay claim to it. The importance of this debate for the legality of trade (and
the illegality of piracy) hardly needs emphasizing, and it was as important then
as it is now.
Brook shows how both jurists’ positions were the result of
specific economic and historical circumstances. De Groot was arguing for the
Dutch East India company, who were trying to break into the market for spices
and exotic woods in what later became the Dutch East Indies, a market that was
exclusively claimed by the Portuguese. To argue that the seas were free was to
argue that the Portuguese had no legal claim to their monopoly, and that the
Dutch could therefore compete. Selden, on the other hand was arguing for the
British government of Charles I, who was contesting lucrative fishing rights
over the North Sea, rights which were also claimed by the Dutch. Selden, who
had been in and out of prison on various political charges connected with the
struggle between the Stuart dynasty and Parliament, was released from prison on
condition that he could provide a legal argument for Charles’s claims. His book
The Closed Sea was the result. Brook comments:
‘The Free Sea’ and ‘The Closed Sea’… were both lawyers briefs written
for their clients… their difference had mostly to do with the interests they
served rather than with the law each sought to uphold.
Although he shies away from coming to the conclusion that
questions of legality are always determined by those who have the power to
enforce it, that legality per se is
simply a cloak to cover the exercise of power, he does quote de Groot’s famous
maxim: Jurists who use their proficiency
in the law to please those in power usually are deceived or themselves deceive.
Given Selden’s interest in other cultures and his professional involvement in
the law of the sea, it’s not surprising that a map from China which puts the
sea at the center became one of the most valued items in his library.
oooOOOooo
Maps are at the center of this book. Brook gives a potted
history of cartography, both European and Chinese. He is very good indeed on
the problems of projecting a round surface onto a flat sheet of paper, and the
various solutions to this problem that have been found throughout history; his
technical descriptions are clear enough for the layperson to grasp without
dumbing down the subject. Brook situates Mr. Selden’s map within the context of
other maps from the period, including those published by Hondius in 1608, Purchas
in 1625 and John Speed in 1627, some of the first writers and cartographers to
depict China for Western eyes, and he draws out the associations between Selden
and these other men. Brook gives detailed descriptions of these and other maps
to highlight their similarities and differences and to arrive at conclusions
about their origins; these descriptions are beautifully complemented by the
lavish full-color illustrations and the diagrams included in the text. The book
is beautifully produced, and for anyone who loves poring over old maps and
documents, reading it is highly pleasurable.
We learn about rutters – pilot’s logbooks with compass
directions and timings, used in the Medieval period in the absence of charts to
help pilots navigate- and their relationships to maps. Rutters were used by the
Dutch, the British, the Portuguese, and by the Chinese, and one of the most
interesting aspects of the book is the space Brook gives to an important
Chinese navigational guide compiled in 1617 by Zhang Xie from oral and other
sources now lost. Zhang’s Study of the
Eastern and Western Seas is an important addition to our understanding of
early navigation techniques and trade routes in the South China Sea, and
complements the information found in an
earlier Chinese rutter known as the Laud Rutter after Archbishop Laud – another
associate of Selden’s – who donated it to the Bodleian. This Chinese rutter
details the routes taken by the great Chinese navigator Zheng He in the
fifteenth century. Brook profitably draws out the connections between the Laud
Rutter, Zhang Xie’s compendium, and the dim tracery of sea routes on the Selden
map. A fortuitous discovery leads him to the conclusion that the cartographer
of the map used these sea routes as a starting point for his drawing of the
coastlines, not the other way round, and this in part accounts for the amazing
accuracy of Mr. Selden’s map.
oooOOOooo
China during the seventeenth century was, for Western eyes,
a site of exotic mystery. Westerners who
went there had the impression that they were ‘opening up’ the country,
‘civilizing’ it, bringing it onto the world stage. Traditionally, Western
historiography has confirmed this Eurocentric view. More accurate, however, is
the view that puts China at the center of the world economy during this period.
Ming Dynasty China drew in silver from Japan and from across the Pacific. This
hunger for silver drove subsidiary trade among the Japanese, the Chinese
diaspora among the archipelagos of the South China Sea, and early Europeans
such as John Saris, who commanded the eighth voyage of the East India Company
to the far east, and the man who is the most likely candidate for the
‘commander’ mentioned in Mr. Selden’s will. The increasing presence of Europeans
in this theatre of operations had a huge impact on Europe and her culture, but
less so on Chinese history and culture. China was the center, and Europe the
periphery, in spite of Europeans’ assertions to the contrary. Whatever
knowledge the Europeans possessed, the Chinese had it too; whatever technology
the Europeans brought with them to China, they found Chinese versions of the
same, often at a higher stage of development, including maps, rutters,
compasses, atlases and compendia of knowledge.
It is Timothy Brook himself who has arguably done the most
to correct our view of the relative importance of China and Europe during the
early modern period, with four magisterial studies of the Ming. Brook as an
academic historian combines detailed readings of source texts that owe much to
the methods of the New Historicists, and the longue duree approach to economic history espoused by the Annales School:
think Stephen Greenblatt meets Fernand Braudel and you get a fair idea of
Brook’s approach to doing academic history. Here, in Mr Selden’s Map of China, he puts his unparalleled knowledge of
Ming China to good use, focusing generally on the way China impacted Europe
rather than on how Europe impacted China; and more especially on how new
discoveries about China were changing European habits of thought.
As evidence of other ways of being and thinking came more insistently
into view, some realized that the old ways were not the only ways and indeed
might have to be revised or superseded. To be alive in John Selden’s day was to
live through this shift in paradigms.
Two examples will suffice. Brook describes how James Ussher
– Mr. Selden’s teacher of Hebrew – dated the creation of the world to 23rd
October 4004 BC by delving into ancient Hebrew texts. The discovery by the next
generation of scholars of the great age of Chinese culture would invalidate
this exercise in pious futility.
Brook comments: The Biblical account of
the creation of the world was only one casualty of the global enlargement of
knowledge that inspired some thinkers to pry up the theological floorboards of
European thought.
The second example is the fascinating story of Michael Shen
Fuzong, the first Chinese to ever visit Europe, a convert to Catholicism, and a
protégé of the Jesuit missionary Philippe Couplet. Shen was presented at the
court of King Louis XIV in 1684, and then later at the court of King James II
in 1685, had his portrait painted by Kneller and was for a while the wonder of
Europe. While in England he worked with Thomas Hyde, the Keeper of the Bodleian
Library, and the man who had entered Mr. Selden’s map into the Library
catalogue. Hyde was something of an enthusiast for Oriental languages, and for
six weeks in 1685, Shen was his teacher. Shen and Hyde studied Mr. Selden’s map
together, annotating it: Shen’s Romanisations of Chinese place names followed
by Hyde’s Latin translations are still visible in the margins of the map. Shen
and Hyde poring over maps and Chinese books together in the Library at Oxford
is an enduring image of a fleeting historical moment when the encounter between
East and West was fruitful and non-invasive. As Brook notes:
The nations and peoples of the world differed, but not in essentials.
Saris could go to them to trade without conquest, Selden to delve into their
documents in search of the common wellsprings of enlightened humanity. It would
be another century before this sense of equality gave way to condescension and
the East India Company concentrated its efforts on stripping the world of its
assets and other peoples of their dignity.
There are countless tales of European travellers to China
and the wonders they found there, but the tale of a Chinese traveller to Europe
and the work he did there to increase European understanding of China is surely
just as fascinating, and Brook does well to give this space.
oooOOOooo
Mr Selden’s Map of
China is Timothy Brook’s second go at writing popular history, after his
earlier prize winning Vermeer’s Hat. Vermeer’s Hat had its academic longeurs as a work of popular history
written for the layperson; Mr Selden’s
Map has no such, and is arguably a better exemplar of the genre. This is
partly due to the emphasis Brook places
on why such an old map of the South China Sea and all its islands is important
to our present historical moment, when the nations around that sea bitterly contest
possession of some of those islands. It is also partly due to Brook’s sensible
decision to foreground himself in the text. He includes personal anecdotes
about his experiences in China as a historian there, and peoples his texts with
pen portraits of his colleagues and his mentor the great Sinologist Joseph
Needham. The book is as much a detective story as a work of history; Brook
describes his elation when he discovers new evidence, recounts his confusion when new evidence
doesn’t fit his emerging picture of the background to the map, and his
consternation when a particular line of enquiry reaches a dead end. This has
the effect of drawing the reader in, making us part of the process of doing
history; he walks with us along the fine line between speculation, imaginative
reconstruction, and what can be established as historical fact. We learn as
much here about how historians do history and of the importance of that history
for our own times as we learn about the actual history of the map itself. This
is surely how popular history should be written.
We never do learn, though, who made the map, or when, or how
it came into Mr. Selden’s possession, so at the center of this book, then, just
as at the center of Mr. Selden’s map of China, is an empty space, a void. But
this doesn’t matter, because, like Brook, we are richer in our knowledge at the
end than when we started.
This piece first appeared in Kyoto Journal 80 and is reposted here with kind permission.
No comments:
Post a Comment