Page 264 - Ming_China_Courts_and_Contacts_1400_1450 Craig lunas

Plate 29.2 Treatise on Military Preparedness (Wubei zhi 武備志), 240.20a–b. Tianqi period edition, 1621–7. National Library of China

(1573–1645) who presented it to the Bodleian Library at The next exception to the disappearance of the
Oxford in 1639, presumably after it had been in his knowledge that the Zheng He expeditions used and
possession for some years. A rutter is a handbook listing the generated is the set of route charts (Pl. 29.2) which Mao
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distances and directions that a mariner should take when Yuanyi 茅元儀 (1594–1640) compiled in the late 1610s and
following a maritime route. The Laud rutter is a included as chapter 240 of his grand survey of military
compilation that presents all the routes from China to affairs, Wubei zhi 武備志 (Treatise on Military Preparedness).
Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean in a one-fascicle These charts, which vary in scale from page to page, show
manuscript handwritten in Chinese (Pl. 29.1). As the the principal routes along which the eunuch envoys and
anonymous but literate editor relates in his preface, his book their military entourages passed. These routes are marked
is not an actual rutter but an edited compilation based on as dotted lines on the water without great precision, though
handwritten records that he was able to acquire. The many are annotated in great detail with the compass
correctness of the data presented in the text he attributes bearings marking the route. This is navigational
entirely to the Zheng He voyages, noting that ‘in the first information of a precise sort, indicating that Mao Yuanyi
year of Yongle [1403] envoys were ordered to go to the had access to a source preserving detailed first-hand
countries of the Western Ocean to present edicts, and so knowledge of the Zheng He sailings. It has been suggested
had multiple opportunities to compile and correct that Mao’s source was a private record that his grandfather,
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[knowledge of] compass routes’. Probably acquired by an Mao Kun茅坤 (1512–1601), acquired in the mid-16th century
agent of the East India Company in the first two decades of while working on Chouhai tubian 籌海圖編 (Illustrated
the 17th century, the Bodleian manuscript must originally Compendium on Maritime Defence), a massive official
have belonged to a Chinese merchant working outside compilation of data concerning coastal administration at the
China in the commercial networks around the South China height of piracy in the Jiajing era (1522–66). If he ever had it,
Sea. Had this manuscript not been removed from Mao Kun did not draw on it for his project, as far as we can
circulation and deposited in a foreign library, it would never detect. By the time of Mao Yuanyi, information concerning
have survived to the 1930s, when the historian Xiang Da navigation routes to the Indian Ocean no longer excited
向達 (1900–66) transcribed it during an academic sojourn state sensitivity. Even to members of the court in the Tianqi
in Oxford. State jealousy of frontier knowledge and private era (1621–7), it was obvious that Chinese ships, and indeed
jealousy of craft knowledge, a deadly combination from the ships from all over the world, were plying these routes in
historian’s point of view, would otherwise have conspired to numbers that defied the presumption that this knowledge
guarantee its destruction. should be construed as secret.

254 | Ming China: Courts and Contacts 1400–1450