Curious bilingual map of East Asia by Tirion

Description

This map of China, Korea, and Japan is from a French edition of Isaak Tirion’s Nieuwe Hand-Atlas (New hand atlas), published in Amsterdam c. 1740.

The map covers a broad region extending from Tibet and India in the west to Japan in the east, and from Siberia and the Kamchatka Peninsula in the north to the northern parts of Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam in the south. It features a mixture of Dutch and French nomenclature and annotations, with the title being in French and Dutch as well.

Notable attributes of the map include:

• Kamchatka is misplaced and distorted, Japan is incomplete and slightly rotated, and the Korean Peninsula is yet to assume a more precise shape.
• Relief is shown pictorially, the Gobi Desert is stippled, nomad camps are symbolised through stylised tents, and cities – through buildings.
• In the south of Kamchatka, there is a pictorial depiction of an erupting volcano, annotated in Dutch as “Burning Mountain” (Brandende Berg). Next to it, Warme Baden indicates the location of hot springs.
• The cartographic myth of Lake Chimay is shown (Chaamay Meer and Lac de Chaamay).
• The Great Wall of China features.
• Countless settlements are named, including Beijing (Pekin), Guangzhou (Canton), Macau (Macao), Hanoi (Tunquin [province]), and Kyoto (Miaco).
• There is an annotation of Potala Palace, the former residence of the Dalai Lama.

The map features a compass rose and a simple title cartouche. Aside of the map title, the cartouche holds two distance scales, with the top one being in English leagues, and the bottom one – in French leagues.

A beautiful and captivating map with plenty of detail to discover.

Publication

Nieuwe Hand-Atlas [c. 1740]

Condition

Fine.

A sharp impression on a clean, watermarked sheet. Issued folding, with wide margins. Beautiful early colouring of map and cartouche. On verso, a few traces of hinging tape. Else, no visible flaws, and no repairs.

Item #: 03007

US $600.00

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