The Selden Map of China, painted with watercolours and ink on
Chinese paper, is a unique example of Chinese merchant cartography
depicting a network of shipping routes starting from the port of
Quanzhou, Fujian province, and reaching as far as Japan and
Indonesia. The map, thought to date from the 1620s, arrived at the
Bodleian in 1659 with the bequest of the London jurist and legal
theorist John Selden, enriching one of the earliest collections of
Chinese material in England at the time. The map’s mandarin text
was annotated in Latin in 1687 by Thomas Hyde, the then Bodleian
Librarian, with the help of Michael Shen Fuzong, a Jesuit convert
visiting from Nanking, who had been invited to assist cataloguing
the library’s Chinese books.
Dimensions: 1.6 x 1 m.
