The Selden Map and a Maritime Museum for Cebu

On the way back from almost a week in Hiroshima, I had to go to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum. It was there in 2014 that a very important seminar was conducted jointly by the museum and Oxford University: a meeting of scholars agog over the discovery of what has come to be known as the Selden Map.

Acquired by the international maritime law theorist and legal luminary of his time, John Selden, it was bequeathed some years after his death to the Bodleian Library at Oxford in 1659. The map that bears Selden’s name was rediscovered by American historian Robert Batchelor of Georgia Southern University, who went to the Bodleian “one cold slushy day in January 2008,” as he describes that fateful day.

Little did he know that he would be presented with what has been adjudged since then as the most important find of the Ming Dynasty in the 21st century, especially since this map was not made for the imperial rulers of China. In brief, the Selden Map has been declared to be a merchant map, made by someone as yet unidentified for someone who also remains unknown. How it came to Selden is in itself a long treatise worthy of a book, which the historical writer Timothy Brooks has in fact detailed in “Mr. Selden’s Map of China,” a copy of which I finally obtained also in Hong Kong.

All told, more wonderful things were in order three years after the map’s rediscovery (after being kept hidden at the Bodleian 349 years). In 2011, following its restoration, it became very clear that this was someone’s mercantile map, seen from a Southeast Asian perspective, given that, unlike imperial Chinese maps, China is not shown at the center of it all. Rather, the different trade routes all emanate from Quanzhou, in Fujian Province, the starting point of the centuries-old land-based silk route. As further analysis would show, these routes were revised from time to time by the mapmaker who expanded the map further, eventually showing signs that this anonymous cartographer eventually ran out of space.

There is one conjecture that the estimated date of this map is not between 1607-19, during the reign of the Wanli Emperor, but rather around 1587, when the map may have been in the Philippines (or made by a Chinese in the Philippines) owing to the many detailed names of Philippine coastal (and hence, trading) ports compared to other places. Among those names is a small land mass with the Chinese characters for Cebu (‘Sok-bu’).

But the point of this short article is the fact that without the 2014 seminar, much would still remain a conjecture. And for this reason, a visit to the Hong Kong Maritime Museum (HKMM) to get a copy of the two-volume output of that seminar was a must for me.

The HKMM is a very important gem in the myriad number of museums in Hong Kong that tourists often miss out as they rush to the Star Ferry to cross back and forth from the island. But unlike most maritime museums I have been to, it does not house a huge boat or the bow of a ship. Rather, it replicates one entering a modern motor vessel, with visitors feeling like passengers going down flights of stairs to the lower deck where one finds the very beginnings of the maritime industry and culture of Hong Kong. As one moves to the second and then the third and final floor, one also sees the changes in shipping and maritime trading that continues up to the present with the huge shipping families of Hong Kong.

As shown by HMM, however, maritime museums are not just repositories showcasing the past. They are also an integral part of knowledge production through meetings and exhibitions, including the all-important 2014 seminar on the Selden Map and the Maritime Silk Route of Southeast Asia.

As we approach the 500th anniversary of the historic encounter between Spaniards led by Magellan and Cebuanos led by Humabon, therefore, the need for a maritime museum is becoming ever more urgent.

With Cebu as the center of both pre-colonial and post-colonial maritime trade in the Visayas and Mindanao, it’s story needs to be told. Magellan would not have been told by Kulambu to proceed to Cebu when the former asked where he could barter for provisions if our ancient Sugbu port was not already a famed international trading hub. Cebu deserves nothing less than a museum celebrating its preeminent position along the maritime trade route. Even the Selden Map identifies it, an affirmation of its importance even way back in the late 1500s.