Dec 10 at 12:00 PM - Sale 2689 -
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Sale 2689 - Lot 91

Estimate: $ 25,000 - $ 35,000
(MANUSCRIPT MAPS -- CHINA, KOREA and JAPAN.) Two fine eighteenth-century French manuscript charts of the East China Sea, the Yellow Sea, and the Sea of Japan (Sea of Korea). Ink and green wash on VDL Strasbourg Lily watermarked laid paper. 20¾x28¾ inches and 21½x29¾ inches each sheet; vertical folds at center, minor oxidized toning. Np, circa 1745
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Additional Details

Individually titled Suite du Plan Depuis Nanquin, Coree, la Tartarie Orientale et les Iles du Japon and Suite du Plan de la Coste de Chine Depuis Cantan Jusques a Nanquin avec les Iles Formosa, Kiusiu, et Partie du Japon, this is an exquisite and important pair of early French Naval manuscript charts of the Far East.

Weinreb & Douwma, Ltd. Catalog 20 (1978), item 38 -- "...part of the catalog involves a single collection of 18th century French material"… "If, as seems likely from the uniformity of style and watermark, these charts were all drawn at roughly the same time, their construction must be placed after 1730, the date occurring on one sheet (2), and before 1745, when some of the material was to be incorporated into Apres de Mannevillette's sea atlas".

Tony Campbell, "The Anglo-French Struggle for India in the eighteenth century", The Map Collector, No. 5, 1978, page 32 -- "Recently an unknown and important collection of manuscript maps, plans and charts, representing a French cartographic archive covering the period 1730-1782, came up for sale... By their very nature, these detailed, official and evidently secret plans must have derived from the Compagnie des Indes (the French East India Company)... Theoretically, the Compagnie des Indes controlled all the trade in French ships carried out between West Africa and the Far East, and a run of sea charts and harbour plans extending from the Cape of Good Hope to Japan, found in the same collection, would undoubtedly have been drawn up for the use of the Company's ships, or for those East Indiamen sailing under its license".

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