A (Rediscovered) Circa 1616 Map by a Chinese Cartographer

choi

Mapping China | A cartographer’s dream; Two books tell the fascinating tale of a rediscovered map of China. Economist, Jan 18, 2014.
www.economist.com/news/books-and ... cartographers-dream

two consecutive paragraphs:

"Selden’s map is a work of art. It is also different from any that had come out of China before. Unlike imperial maps before it, and after, China itself is not in the middle. The map views Asia from the sea and not from the land, so the South China Sea is at the centre. It is a traders’ map and the merchant routes through Asia are marked with lines criss-crossing the seas.

"The map presents a different story from the one that is frequently told of 17th-century China—of a culture in isolation, cut off from the rest of the world. Even more surprising, then, that the map could have been put in a drawer in the Bodleian more than a century ago and not seen again until an American academic, Robert Batchelor, discovered it in 2008. One of those who saw it next was another historian, Timothy Brook. Now both men have written books about it.


Note:
(a) This is a book reviews on two books, both on the same subject: the map.
(i)  Timothy Brook, Mr Selden’s Map of China; Decoding the secrets of a vanished cartographer. Bloomsbury USA, 2013;
(ii) Robert Batchelor, London; The Selden map and the making of a global city, 1549-1689. University of Chicago Press, 2014,
whose cover is part of the map in question.
press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/L/bo16723349.html  

(b) The map:

Andrew Taubman, The Hidden Selden Map: A Guest Post. Indigo, Sept 25, 2013
blog.indigo.ca/non-fiction/item/1511-hidden-selden-map-guest-post.html
("Images excerpted from Mr. Selden’s Map of China Copyright ©2013 Timothy Brook and reproduced by kind permission of House of Anansi Press")

(c) "Oxford University’s Bodleian Library * * * houses a special map of China, bequeathed in 1654 by an English lawyer, John Selden (pictured). The map was probably drawn by a Chinese cartographer in Java around 1610, when China was still the world’s biggest economy and Europeans longed to trade there. It came into Selden’s possession through an English sea captain. During the first half of the 17th century, it was the most accurate chart of Asia in the world; clearly marked upon it are some of the disputed islands."
(i) Bodleian Library
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bodleian_Library

At the urging of Thomas Bodley, "Duke Humfrey’s Library [at Oxford] was refitted, and Bodley donated a number of his own books to furnish it. The library was formally re-opened on Nov 8, 1602 under the name 'Bodleian Library' (officially Bodley's Library)."
(ii) John Selden
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Selden
(1584-1654)

(d) regarding Brook's book: "King James II is there, witnessing a food fight at the Bodleian in 1687. Ben Jonson appears. So, too, does Shen Fuzong, a Catholic convert and the first Chinese man to visit Oxford."
(i) James II of England
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_II_of_England
(1633-1701; reign 1685 –1688; deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688)
(ii) Ben Jonson
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Jonson
(1572-1637; an English playwright)
(c) For SHEN Fuzong, see Michael SHEN Fu-Tsung  沈福宗
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Shen_Fu-Tsung
("from Nanjing and a convert to Catholicism who was brought to Europe by the Flemish Jesuit priest Philippe Couplet * * * they left Macao in 1681;"  He died as he was returning to China, somewhere near Portuguese Mozambique, in 1691)

(e) Mare Clausum (“The Closed Sea”)/ Mare Liberum (“The Open Sea”)

Latin English dictionary:
(i) mare (noun neuter): "sea"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/mare
(ii) clausum (from Latin clausus (“shut, closed”), perfect passive participle of claudō (“I shut, close”))
(A) (noun neuter): "enclosed space"
(B) ([past] participle): closed"
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/clausum
(iii) liberum (adj; from Latin līber)
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/liberum

(f) The English surname Batchelor: "status name for a young knight or novice at arms, Middle English and Old French bacheler (medieval Latin baccalarius), a word of unknown ultimate origin. The word had already been extended to mean ‘(young) unmarried man’ by the 14th century, but it is unlikely that many bearers of the surname derive from the word in that sense."

(g) Antwerp
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerp
(section 1.1 Origin of the name)