Sailing from Ming China

In 2008, an unusual 17th-century Chinese wall map of East Asia surfaced in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, bearing almost no resemblance to any previous Chinese map. Were it not for its perfect provenance, it might have been dismissed as a fake. But it wasn’t: it was simply drawn according to a completely different cartographic logic — a maritime logic — that was lost as soon as it surfaced.
Prof. Brook (History Department, University of British Columbia-Vancouver) is a distinguished historian of Ming & Qing Dynasties in China, and has taught at Oxford, Toronto, and Stanford. He is the author of an impressive array of works, including Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World and Death by a Thousand Cuts.

Sponsored by the UCSB East Asia Center.

jwil 07.i.2013