almost every night. I remember little from that trip except the times in London, Paris, and Madrid where we spent three days more focused on doing the laundry rather than seeing the sights.
Then came the bigger regret. I declined a six-month grant to dig up old maps of the Philippines from libraries, archives, and museums abroad to bring home digital copies that would trump China’s so-called “historical claims” over the West Philippine Sea. This wouldn’t have been work at all, because I would have enjoyed the research. But I believed arguing against China’s historical claims that stretch back 2,000 years was futile.
Carpio then explained that in the Chinese maps they surveyed, “…from the Song and fast forward to their last dynasty, the Qing dynasty, all their maps uniformly show that their southernmost territory is Hainan. So we presented this to the Tribunal. If you superimpose all the maps from the Song to the Qing dynasties to cover almost a thousand years, the southernmost territory of China was Hainan.”