As the illustrated paperback cover of this book announces at once, this is a book about the 17th century, and as much about Britain then as China. Yet no one is permitted to be a professor of Chinese history – let alone a professor of Chinese, as the author was at the start of this project – without being required to pronounce on contemporary China as well. This is because unlike the professor of Greek literature, who is not required to comment on the state of the Greek economy, teachers of matters Chinese must earn their keep more strenuously, for China is plainly to the casual observer all of a piece. Knowing this, Tim Brook begins the book with some salutary observations on current Chinese preoccupations with cartography and territorial integrity based on personal experience, while at the same time warning that he will take us into a time and place where these preoccupations were as yet quite meaningless. Even so, he naturally does not fail to point out that the area covered by the map in question – the South China Sea – is the very spot on the globe where many currently await the eruption of simmering disputes over the minute Spratly and Paracel Islands and the consequent onset of Armageddon, as a faltering economy drives the Chinese leadership to demonstrate its nationalist credentials through reckless aggression.

Fortunately professors of Chinese history are allowed to defer the delicate matter of prophecy to the denizens of think tanks. But anyone with an eye to the future as well as the past may like to keep a copy of this book handy. I would strongly recommend that they read it too, for it has been written with a non-academic audience in mind, and so despite the incorporation of a fair amount of technical detail about early modern navigation can be read quite painlessly, even with considerable pleasure. The map, bequeathed to the Bodleian by John Selden, pioneer theorist of the law of the sea, turns out to date to about 1608 and to be the work of a Chinese navigator, aware to some degree of European cartographic practice, who devised a means of representing open sea navigation both entirely individual and remarkably sophisticated for that date, even if by the time the map had reached its present home in Oxford, European techniques were pulling ahead of this singular achievement.

Decoding the methods used by this anonymous innovator is a task ingeniously carried out with the use both of historical texts and modern science. Anyone going through this account with an eye to the Sinology will notice that one or two complications have been eliminated in the interests of avoiding too taxing an amount of detail. As well as drawing on a couple of useful printed sources in Chinese, Tim Brook is able to illuminate many aspects of the map by means of a Chinese manuscript rutter (seaman's guide), first found in the Bodleian by Xiang Da, that also arrived there in the 17th century. In fact, in studying this document Xiang Da also had available two other Chinese rutters from the late 17th century, one in his own possession and one from the Backhouse Collection, again in the Bodleian. By comparing these he was disposed to conclude for example that references in them to the famous voyages of Zheng He were more “for show” than an indication of the derivation of the information they contained. One cannot help remarking, incidentally, that the gloomy judgment that Oxford will never again allow the Bodleian to fall under the direction of anyone with a knowledge of Oriental languages may for all I know be true, but that Cambridge, whatever its future, has shown a more adventurous attitude within living memory. As for the Spratlys and Paracels, on p. 167 it is concluded that though they may be mentioned in a vague and general way as hazards to navigation, they were not regarded by those Chinese who sailed that way in 1608 as territory at all – not that such information is likely to safeguard our global future in the slightest.