Dimensions: 1466 X 1565 mm

No. 25

[VERBIEST, Ferdinand]. K'oen -yu ts'iuen t'ou [Western hemisphere].

Beijing, 1674, but reprinted Canton 1860. Xylograph, printed on 3 sheets, the southern polar landmass embellished with animals, including a beaver and a turkey, the spandrels with four large lozenges with text descriptions.

One of the largest hemispherical maps ever printed. Verbiest's original is as rare as its forerunner produced by Matteo Ricci at Beijing in 1602 (or its now-lost predecessors). This reprint is almost as rare. It is easily distinguished from the 1674 by the addition of a new imprint in Chinese (accompanied with a chop in this example), and by the fact that the text in the spandrels of the original is within differently-shaped frames. The map itself has many similarities to Ricci's (on a Mercator projection), with updating to reflect European (largely English) exploration of the Canadian Arctic and Greenland.