New acquisition: Blaeu's map of Japan and Korea, 1655
We have added to the collection Joan Blaeu's Iaponia Regnum, the map of Japan and Korea from the Novus Atlas Sinensis, the atlas of China that the Jesuit missionary Martino Martini brought back from the East and that Blaeu published at Amsterdam in 1655 as the sixth part of his Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. It was the most authoritative European map of Japan of the second half of the seventeenth century and the first in a general atlas to show Korea as a peninsula rather than an island. Blaeu combined Martini's Chinese and Jesuit sources with what the Dutch East India Company had learned on the spot: the east coast of Honshu and the south of Yezo carry the Dutch names given by Maarten Gerritsz. Vries on his voyage of 1643 in search of the gold and silver islands. For a century after the closing of Japan the Dutch were the only Europeans admitted to the country, and this map, made in the city of the Company, was Europe's window on the archipelago. Our example is in old colour with wide margins and carries the manuscript number of an early owner, showing that it once formed part of a bound atlas.