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

Brook, Timothy

ISBN 10: 1770893539 / ISBN 13: 9781770893535

Published by House Of Anansi Press Limited, Toronto, ON, Canada, 2013

About this Item

The green boards have a light bump to base of the spine, previous owner's stamp on front free page, some illustrations with 211 pages. The dust jacket is not price clipped and is in a Brodart cover.

Seller Inventory # 12541

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Mr Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer
• Publisher: House Of Anansi Press Limited, Toronto, ON, Canada
• Publication Date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1770893539
• ISBN 13: 9781770893535
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: First Edition.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Seller catalogs:
  • History

About this title

Synopsis

Selected for The Globe 100 Books in 2013.

A fascinating work of history, biography, cartography, and literary mystery, Mr Selden’s Map of China unlocks the secrets behind a recently discovered map of China like no other of its time.

In 1659, a vast and unusual map of China arrived in the Bodleian Library, Oxford. It was bequeathed by John Selden, a London business lawyer, political activist, former convict, MP, and the city’s first Orientalist scholar. Largely ignored, it remained in the bowels of the library, until called up by an inquisitive reader. When Timothy Brook saw it in 2009, he realized that the Selden Map was “a puzzle that had to be solved”: an exceptional artefact so unsettlingly modern-looking it could almost be a forgery. But it was genuine, and what it has to tell us is astonishing. It shows China, not cut off from the world, but a participant in the embryonic networks of global trade that fuelled the rise of Europe — and now power China’s ascent. And it raises as many question as it answers: How did John Selden acquire it? Where did it come from? Who re-imagined the world in this way and, most importantly, what can it tell us about the world at that time?

Like a cartographic detective, award-winning author and historian Timothy Brook has provided answers. From the Gobi Desert to the Philippines, from Java to Tibet, and into China itself, Brook uses the map to tease out the varied elements that defined this crucial period in China’s history.

About the Author

Timothy Brook is the award-winning author or editor of twelve books on China, including Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Democracy Movement and Opium Regimes: China, Britain, and Japan, 1839–1952. He is Professor of History at University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.