L’Asie dressée selon les dernières relations et suivant les nouvelles découvertes dont les points principaux sont placés sur les observations de Mrs. de l’Académie Royale des Sciences

1717

Copper engraving on paper

Print size: 8.75 x 12.5 in (22.5 x 32 cm)
Sheet size: 10 x 12.5 in (25.5 x 32 cm)
Folded: 6.5 x 3.25 in (16.5 x 8.5 cm)

L’Asie — Nicolas de Fer’s Monumental Map of Asia with Jesuit China, Tartary, and the East Indies

This monumental map of Asia by Nicolas de Fer represents one of the most ambitious French cartographic syntheses of the early eighteenth century, integrating scientific aspiration, Jesuit intelligence, and inherited Dutch geography into a single authoritative continental vision. Extending from the Ottoman frontier to Japan and the Pacific, the sheet reflects the expanding epistemic reach of France’s Académie Royale des Sciences and the geopolitical imagination of Bourbon Europe.

Although framed as a work of “new discoveries,” the map is based substantially on Dutch precedents, particularly in its treatment of Siberia and the East Indies. The northern coastline draws upon the pioneering explorations published by Nicolaes Witsen, with Arctic capes such as Cap Tabin and Cap Glace marking a significant advance in European conceptions of the far north. China is rendered with enhanced structural coherence informed by Jesuit missionary surveys, while the interior is richly animated with geographic detail, including what appears to be a road linking Moscow to Peking and a delineation of the Great Wall. The Caspian Sea is presented in an idiosyncratic form, reminding the viewer of the uneven reliability of continental knowledge at this transitional moment.

De Fer’s most striking original intervention is the depiction of a continuous landbridge extending from northern Korea and eastern Siberia across toward America—an ambitious hypothesis acknowledged in an accompanying note citing Portuguese sources. Speculative elements persist elsewhere, including the legendary Lake Chiamay, long imagined as the source of Southeast Asia’s great rivers. Japan remains curiously undefined despite De Fer’s access to Jesuit mapping, with Hokkaido (Ieso) reduced to a small circular island north of the archipelago.

The Indian subcontinent is articulated within a political framework that recognises the expanse of the Mughal Empire, yet its outline derives largely from the Blaeu tradition, itself rooted in Linschoten’s late sixteenth-century coastal form. The peninsula’s characteristic westward twist is here exaggerated, illustrating both the endurance of early modern prototypes and the selective incorporation of new data.

Lavishly engraved with theatrical Baroque cartouches by Nicolas Guérard and executed by Harmanus van Loon, the sheet exemplifies De Fer’s fusion of decorative grandeur, political projection, and geographic scholarship. Rare on the market, it remains a cornerstone map for collectors of exploration, empire, and the evolving European vision of Asia.

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