Selden seen

It was half an hour before closing time at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library and historian Robert Batchelor was finishing his research before catching a plane home, from Britain to the United States.

As the library staff tidied up around him, he briefly turned his attention to a document described as, “A very odd mapp of China. Very large, & taken from Mr Selden’s [collection]”.

That description, written almost 300 years earlier, fairly accurately summed up the giant manuscript map that had been carefully unrolled before him. One metre wide and 1.5 metres tall, badly crumbling sections revealed a hand-drawn and coloured map of Asia. For three and a half centuries – since its arrival in the Bodleian in 1659 – people had come to look at this curiosity and marvel at the prettiness of its design and colour. But Batchelor knew in an instant that there was much more to this map – and that he had struck gold.

As a scholar of the expansion of British trade in the 17th century, what Batchelor discerned – and others had not – was a series of faint lines radiating out from Quanzhou, a seaport in Fujian province; lines following shipping routes across vast swaths of Asia, from southern Japan to the west coast of India with written instructions on how to get as far as Oman, Aden and the Strait of Hormuz. This, then, was no ordinary map: this was a merchant’s map, a snapshot of a previously hidden but extensive world of Chinese maritime trade in the late 16th or early 17th century, a period when, it had been thought, China was “closed off “ from the rest of the world.

Furthermore, it wasn’t just the trade routes that marked this map as extraordinary; it was also the radical way in which China was depicted that grabbed Batchelor’s attention and made it one of the most exciting discoveries of recent years, for the Bodleian and oriental scholars across the world. In official or scholarly Chinese maps from the period, China normally occupies the whole of the frame, asserting loudly to the viewer that China is the whole world and nothing more need be known. But this map lays out the whole of eastern Asia, with China nudged to the top: its focus is not land at all but the South China Sea and everything that lies within its reach – the first known map of its kind to show this and certainly the only surviving map to do so.

David Helliwell, curator of the Chinese collections at the Bodleian, was there, in January 2008, when Batchelor made his discovery.

“It was wonderful to have that happen on my watch,” says Helliwell.