L’Asie, divisée en ses principaux États

1778

Original hand-coloured copper engraving on paper

Print size: 12.25 x 14.25 in (31 x 36 cm)
Sheet size: 14.75 x 21.25 in (37.5 x 54 cm)

L’Asie, divisée en ses principaux États — a refined French Enlightenment map of Asia, with India at the centre of Asian trade networks

Jean Janvier’s L’Asie, divisée en ses principaux États represents a mature expression of late-eighteenth-century French Enlightenment cartography, combining improved geographic intelligence with the residual speculative traditions of earlier European mapping. Published by Jean Lattré for the influential Atlas Moderne, the map reflects France’s expanding intellectual, commercial, and diplomatic engagement with Asia in the decades preceding the dominance of British scientific surveying.

Within the composition, the Indian subcontinent occupies a central and comparatively authoritative position, benefiting from sustained European maritime contact, commercial exchange, and regional reporting. Coastlines along the Malabar and Coromandel shores are rendered with relative clarity, while Bengal and the Bay of Bengal appear as a principal maritime corridor linking South Asia with Southeast Asia and China. India is thus situated as a key node within the wider Indian Ocean world, shaped by long-standing networks of trade in textiles, spices, and other commodities.

By contrast, Janvier preserves notable uncertainties elsewhere in Asia, most strikingly in the North Pacific. The map charts the fabled Terre de Gama (also called Terre de la Compagnie) just east of Yeco (Hokkaido)—a phantom landmass associated with the legendary “Jean de Gama,” supposedly glimpsed by seventeenth-century voyagers. Though later explorers intermittently claimed sightings, Vitus Bering searched unsuccessfully for Juan de Gama Land in 1729, and the myth was gradually dismantled through eighteenth-century Russian and, ultimately, Cook’s Pacific investigations. Its lingering presence here illustrates how such conjectural geographies endured on European maps for decades, often arising from mis-mapping of Hokkaido or the Kurile chain.

Hokkaido itself (Yeco) and Sakhalin appear in evolving forms, while portions of New Guinea remain incomplete, underscoring the transitional state of Asian geographic knowledge in the 1770s—poised between Renaissance cosmography and the emerging precision of modern exploration.

Elegantly engraved and attractively hand-coloured, with a large allegorical cartouche celebrating Asia’s wealth and significance, Janvier’s sheet offers a historically revealing vision of India and the wider Asian world on the eve of systematic survey cartography and stands as a refined and collectible Enlightenment-period map at the intersection of empiricism and enduring legend.

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