Download Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer AudioBook Free
From the writer of the award-winning Vermeer's Hat, a historical detective storyline decoding a long-forgotten website link between 17th-century Europe and China. Timothy Brook's award-winning Vermeer's Hat unfolded the early record of globalization, using Vermeer's paintings to show how objects like beaver hats and porcelain bowls started to circulate throughout the world. Now he plumbs the unknown of a single artifact that offers new insights into global contacts centuries old. In 2009 2009, a fantastic map of China was uncovered in Oxford's Bodleian Collection - where it got first been transferred 350 years before, then stowed and forgotten for nearly a hundred years. Neither historians of China nor cartography experts got ever seen anything enjoy it. It had been so strange that experts would have declared it a fake - yet data confirmed it turned out sent to Oxford in 1659. The "Selden Map", as it is well known, was a puzzle that needing fixing. Brook, a historian of China, set out to explore the riddle. His exploration will lead listeners around this elegant, enigmatic work of art, and from the heart of China, via the Southern Sea, to the judge of King James II. In the storyline of Selden's map, he unveils for all of us the unusual links between an British scholar and vendors half a world away, and offers novel insights in to the power and and therefore a single map can take. Brook gives the same anecdote-rich narrative, interesting characters, and unpredicted historical contacts that made Vermeer's Hat an instant classic.
