Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer - Hardcover

Brook, Timothy

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1620401436 ISBN 13: 9781620401439

Publisher: Bloomsbury Press, 2013

Synopsis

Timothy Brook's award-winning Vermeer's Hat unfolded the early history of globalization, using Vermeer's paintings to show how objects like beaver hats and porcelain bowls began to circulate around the world. Now he plumbs the mystery of a single artifact that offers new insights into global connections centuries old.

In 2009, an extraordinary map of China was discovered in Oxford's Bodleian Library-where it had first been deposited 350 years before, then stowed and forgotten for nearly a century. Neither historians of China nor cartography experts had ever seen anything like it. It was so odd that experts would have declared it a fake-yet records confirmed it had been delivered to Oxford in 1659. The “Selden Map,” as it is known, was a puzzle that needing solving.

Brook, a historian of China, set out to explore the riddle. His investigation will lead readers around this elegant, enigmatic work of art, and from the heart of China, via the Southern Ocean, to the court of King James II. In the story of Selden's map, he reveals for us the surprising links between an English scholar and merchants half a world away, and offers novel insights into the power and meaning that a single map can hold. Brook delivers the same anecdote-rich narrative, intriguing characters, and unexpected historical connections that made Vermeer's Hat an instant classic.

About this title

About the Author

Timothy Brook is a professor of history and principal of St. John's College at the University of British Columbia. He is the author of many books, including Vermeer's Hat, winner of the Mark Lynton Prize for outstanding achievement in world history, and Confusions of Pleasure, which received the Joseph Levenson Prize from the Association for Asian Studies. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.

Reviews

Historian Brook (Vermeer's Hat) offers the definitive study of the singular Selden Map, an archived and forgotten enigma thought to be from the Ming era. Unexplored prior to this book, the Chinese map is named for 17th-century historian John Selden, who, though unable to decipher its characters, donated the map to Oxford out of his passion to ensure the survival of knowledge. Brook continues this tradition of scholarly passion with a methodical analysis, exploring the map's anachronisms, its stunning accuracy for the time, and its emphasis on sea routes. These features are explained through histories of the complex trade relationship between East and West in the 17th century. Ironically, the map was of little practical function; it passed quickly from use and into storage, and was made redundant by improved maps that were created only a few decades later—making its accuracy now purely of historical interest. While Brook finds the Selden Map to be the key to a wide range of historic insights, the cascade of names, dates, linguistic analysis, and maritime policy may be daunting for the casual reader. The scholar, however, will appreciate the level of detail, breadth of analysis, and ingenuity in Brook's ability to expound such a wealth of history from a single document. Agent: Beverley Slopen, Beverley Slopen Agency. (Oct.)

Brook (Vermeer’s Hat, 2007) is no stranger to Chinese history. The discovery of a map of China in Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 2009 piqued the scholar’s curiosity and led him to explore the map’s provenance, uncover its secrets, and reexamine what it meant for his understanding of seventeenth-century globalization. As Brook notes in his preface, his book is really about not the map itself but “the people whose stories intersected with it.” That cast of characters is vast, including Selden contemporaries Ben Jonson, John Donne, Walter Raleigh, William Shakespeare, and the governor of the East India Company, Thomas Smythe. Brook uses the map to take readers on a journey back to a time of territorial as well as intellectual expansion, in which the confining bounds of the medieval past were finally overcome. While the book does drift from its central purpose at times, it is an engagingly written, insightful look into just how fluid perceptions and realities have been in both the past and the present. --Brian Odom

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1620401436
• ISBN 13: 9781620401439
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 240