Mr. Selden's Map of China: Decoding the Secrets of a Vanished Cartographer

What turned out to be the most important Chinese map of the past seven hundred years had been gathering dust in the basement stacks of Oxford's Bodleian Library for nearly a century, when in 2008 an American historian became curious about an old catalogue listing and called it up. Records showed that the one-by-two-meter scroll, beautifully drawn and colored in the style of a Chinese landscape painting, arrived at the Bodleian in 1659 as part of a large bequest of books and manuscripts by the late John Selden, the foremost English legal scholar of his time, and a prime architect of the international law of the sea.