De Wit Map of Tartary, China & Japan, 1680

The story of this map

Frederick de Wit inherited the Dutch mapmaking tradition at its height and ran it into the eighteenth century, and his map of the eastern half of Asia — Great Tartary, the Mogul Empire, China and Japan — is one of the handsomest sheets in his atlas of about 1680. The Library of Congress copy is a clean impression, mounted on cloth.

The map is the Europe of the Jesuit missions looking east. China is drawn from the Jesuit surveys, its provinces named and the Great Wall marked as a crenellated line along the northern frontier; Korea is at last a peninsula rather than the island of earlier maps; Japan is the familiar three islands with Ezo unfinished to the north. Above them stretches Great Tartary, a name for everything from the Caspian to the Pacific that Europe had heard of but not seen, dotted with the tents and cities of the Mongols. The Mogul Empire fills India to the south-west.

The cartouche and the compass roses are the reason to hang it: de Wit’s engravers gave the sheet the full late-baroque treatment, and the copperplate line is crisp enough at 9,300 pixels that the hatching of the mountains reads at 24×30 inches.

Printed to order on archival matte paper, framed in the country of delivery, and offered at 16×20 and 24×30 as exact fits.

Before and after

Left: the archive scan exactly as published. Right: the file that goes to the printer.

Archive scanRestored

Restoration notes

Restoration: cropped the scanner bed and mount margins, corrected levels and colour cast while keeping the paper tone, removed dust and specks, applied gentle sharpening. Fold lines, stains and period annotations are kept where they belong to the object; nothing is redrawn.

Every print carries its archive credit on the packing slip. Paper tone and small imperfections of the original are kept on purpose; nothing is redrawn.