"To be able to show this game-changing - and stunning - map in [the Hong Kong Maritime Museum] would be the stuff of dreams," Stephen Davies, former director of the museum, said in that article.
The map was created in China in the early 1600s, during the Ming dynasty, but is named after the British lawyer who purchased it in London and left it to the Oxford University library when he died, in 1654. In 2008, it was rediscovered in the depths of the Bodleian, long forgotten and fast rotting. Hours before catching a plane back to the United States, historian Robert Batchelor chanced upon the map and realised he'd found something big.
The map's significance relates to a series of faint lines radiating from Quanzhou, a seaport in Fujian. At a time when China was widely considered to be closed off from the rest of the world, the map shows trade routes linking the country to ports across Asia and as far away as Oman.
The museum's "Mapping Ming China's Maritime World - The Selden Map and Other Treasures from the University of Oxford" exhibition, which opens on Friday, presents the map in the context of the seafaring exploits of the Ming dynasty. Also on display will be the manuscript Shun Feng Xiang Song, which is a compilation of compass bearings.