Mapping Ming China’s Maritime World – The Selden Map and Other Treasures from the University of Oxford – HK Maritime Museum

I blogged recently on the excellent book from Timothy Brooks’s Mr Selden’s Map of China – you can now see the map, till June, at Hong Kong’s Maritime Museum…

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,