X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Selden Map of China


Selden Map of China

The routes and locations on the map have parallels with but do not match two famous accounts of navigation from the early seventeenth century, notably the Shunfeng Xiangsong (順風相送) owned by William Laud and now also in the Bodleian, the maps of Zheng He's voyages in the Wubei Zhi (ca. 1628) and Zhang Xie's (張燮) Dongxi Yangkao (東西洋考, 1617).

It shows a system of navigational routes emanating from a point off Fujian Province near the cities of Quanzhou and Zhangzhou, from which a principal route goes northeast towards Nagasaki and southwest towards Hoi An and then on to Pahang with another route heading past Penghu towards a point northwest of Manila.

The Selden Map of China (Bodleian Library, MS Selden Supra 105) is an early seventeenth-century map of East Asia formerly owned by the legal scholar and maritime theorist John Selden.



see also