L’Empire du Japon, Tire des Cartes…

Striking c.18th hand coloured map of Japan by Henri Abraham Chatelain, based on the map by orientalist Adrien Reland’s issued four years earlier. Reland taught at the University of Utrecht, created a totally new model in the depiction of the island. Though he took into account information the Europeans had collected in the two preceding centuries, for his inset map of the coasts around Nagasaki, he completely ignored all other information in his depiction of Japan as a whole. For that he placed all his trust in a Japanese model. According to a legend, added to the lower border of one of his later maps, one of his students had placed such a Japanese map from the library of Benjamin Dutry, at his disposal. Dutry had been the director of the Dutch East India Company, and the map had probably been brought to him from Nagasaki.

Reland was the first to use Sino-Japanese characters on a map of Japan, this map became a model for a number of other mapmakers.

From Chatelain’s, Atlas Historique Volume 5.