‘UNSURPASSED IN DETAIL, ILLUSTRATION, INFLUENCE AND POPULARITY’
MONTANUS, Arnoldus (attributed), John OGILBY (translator).
Atlas Chinensis: being a second part of a relation of remarkable passages in two embassies from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Vice-roy Singlamong and General Taising Lipovi, and to Konchi, Emperor of China and East-Tartary ...
London, Thomas Johnson for the author, 1671.
Folio, pp. [4], 723, [1 (blank)]; with copper-engraved frontispiece, one double-page map, 38 plates (mostly double-page); numerous copper-engraved illustrations in the text, title printed in red and black, woodcut initials and headpieces; some creasing and chipping to fore-edges of first few leaves, some browning and occasional short closed tears to plates, creasing to edges of plates facing pp. 192 and 568, occasional foxing and light marks; overall a very good copy in near-contemporary mottled calf, boards panelled in gilt, gilt red morocco lettering-piece to spine; sympathetically rebacked and recornered, some wear to extremities and abrasions to covers.
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Atlas Chinensis: being a second part of a relation of remarkable passages in two embassies from the East-India Company of the United Provinces, to the Vice-roy Singlamong and General Taising Lipovi, and to Konchi, Emperor of China and East-Tartary ...
First English edition, copiously and handsomely illustrated, recounting Balthasar Bort and Pieter van Hoorn’s embassies to China on behalf of the Dutch East India Company and containing a full general description of China ‘unsurpassed in detail, illustration, influence and popularity’ (Bibliotheca Wittockiana).
Erroneously attributed by the English publisher to the editor of the Atlas Japannensis, Arnoldus Montanus (or van den Berg), the work is in fact an abridged translation of Olfert Dapper’s Gedenkwaerdig Bedryf der Nederlandsche Oost-Indische Maetschappye, published the previous year. Although Dapper himself never left the Netherlands, he had access to manuscripts, reports, and Koloniaal Archief documents, some of which are reprinted and translated in the work itself: ‘consequently his book is a conglomeration of reports from members of Bort’s expeditions and Hoorn’s embassy together with descriptions of China gleaned from other sources. Dapper expended little effort at integrating the material he had collected. Often he reproduced parallel passages from several writers on a single topic without any comment of his own.’ Despite this, his work ‘was virtually an encyclopaedia of things Chinese for the Dutch reader of the latter part of the century’ (Lach & Van Kley).
The English translation, slightly abridged from the Dutch original and containing a dedication to Charles II, is the work of the Scottish former dancer John Ogilby (1600–1676) who, following an injury, turned his attention to dance teaching, directing, translating, and eventually to publishing and printing. The first part of the work is dedicated to Boort’s expeditions along the Fukien coast between 1663 and 1664 and is followed by an account of Pieter van Hoorn’s subsequent mission to Beijing (Peking, 1666-68), an embassy which not only failed to obtain trading concessions from the Kangxi Emperor but even led to the formal revocation of all special Dutch privileges (see Löwendahl). Although the narratives of both embassies are interspersed with information on Chinese geography, culture, and history, the work ends with the aforementioned ‘Description of the Empire of China’, which ‘covers every imaginable aspect of China as far as it was then known’ (Bibliotheca Wittockiana).
Particularly notable in this edition are the full set of thirty-eight plates as well as over fifty intricate illustrations in the text, depicting all manner of objects of topographical, ethnological, religious, political, historical, cultural, linguistic, zoological, and botanical interest. These plates are copied from those first featured in the original Dutch edition, including the original Dutch frontispiece. Many of the plates feature both a Dutch and an English description.
Bibliotheca Wittockiana MMIX, n. 21 (Dutch edition); Cordier, Sinica 2349; ESTC R5629; Lach & Van Kley IV, pp. 490-491; Löwendahl 145 (Dutch edition); Lust 525; Morrison I, 564-565.
