by MICHAEL RANK
“Mr Selden’s Map of China” by Timothy Brook
To discover a forgotten gem hidden away in the bowels of an ancient library must be the secret dream of any historian, and this is what happened to Richard Batchelor, an American historian of the British empire, a few years ago as he was rifling through the pages of an old catalogue of holdings in the Bodleian Library in Oxford.
Batchelor’s discovery was a long-lost 17th century Chinese map of China and Southeast Asia. It came to the attention of Timothy Brook, formerly professor of Chinese at Oxford University, and the result was this fascinating book.
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Although the map is probably primarily of interest as evidence of China’s rich maritime heritage, another intriguing fact is that it depicts Kubla Khan’s capital of Shangdu – better known in the west as Xanadu – in the northeast corner of China, with characters written inside a gourd instead of a circle like other place names.
Shangdu was no mythical city, but the capital of the Jin dynasty some 400 years before the map was created. The city had been abandoned three centuries before the map was drawn, so it’s little wonder that while the real Shangdu lay 300 kilometers directly north of Beijing, it is shown on the map about twice that distance to the east.
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