Jesuit Mapmaking in China: D’Anville’s Nouvelle Atlas de la Chine (1737) ed. by Roberto M. Ribeiro, with John W. O’Malley (review)

Virtually all historians of Asia are familiar with the long history of Jesuit cartography in China, most famously the world map produced by the Jesuit polymath Matteo Ricci. This welcome study and facsimiles of the Jesuit Jean-Baptiste du Halde’s famous Nouvel atlas de la Chine (1737) provides a comprehensive outline of the context and historical production of what was in 1737, “the world’s most precise and most authoritative China maps before the 20th century” (p. 29). Edited by Roberto Ribeiro, Jesuit Mapmaking in China consists of an introduction by Ribeiro and three scholarly essays by R. Po-chia Hsia, Mario Cams, and Han Qi, followed by two-page facsimiles of the forty-two maps prepared for du Halde by the French cartographer Jean-Baptiste Bourguignon d’Anville. Whereas Jesuit mapmaking in China is briefly discussed in previous books such as Florence Hsia’s Sojourners in a Strange Land (Chicago, 2009), Benjamin Elman’s On Their Own Terms (Cambridge, MA, 2005), and Anthony Grafton’s edited volume Rome Reborn (Washington, DC, 1993), this work delivers a concentrated analysis of the single most ambitious Jesuit geodetic project in history.

Following Ribeiro’s introduction are three chapters that contextualize and describe the prodigious Nouvel atlas de la Chine. The first essay by Hsia recounts the footsteps of early Jesuits in China, reframing information communicated in numerous other works. Regardless of Hsia’s rearticulation of now commonplace information, his sketch of important Jesuit events in China such as the “Calendar Case” (p. 28) in 1646 and the rites controversies during the late-seventeenth century provide a framework within which to examine the cartographic efforts of the Jesuits under Kangxi’s patronage. The second essay by Mario Cams centers on Jean-Baptiste d’Anville, who was commissioned by du Halde in 1728 to produce a more detailed and accurate series of maps based on an earlier atlas completed by Jesuits of the China mission in 1718. Cams traces communications between du Halde and d’Anville as the Nouvel atlas de la Chine was researched, refined, redrawn, engraved, and finally published at Paris in 1735. Among the manifest qualities of this essay is Cams’s meticulous comparison of d’Anville’s original sources and the maps finally printed, highlighting d’Anville’s methods of producing more accurate renderings of China’s provinces and other areas such as Korea and Tibet. D’Anville’s atlas, as Cams notes, reached Beijing two years after its publication and received critical appraisals from the Jesuits there. Among the strongest critics of the atlas was Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla, who complained that “the orthography of geographic names … were drawn after consulting different sources of data” and were thus inconsistent compared to the original Chinese atlas (p. 45).

The final essay by Qi relies on Chinese sources to place the Jesuit mapmaking enterprise within a more collaborative setting, demonstrating that the European Jesuits were not alone as they surveyed China to produce the 1718 atlas. They, in fact, worked with other Chinese experts and even a French Augustinian missionary as they traveled through China from 1708 to 1717. The majority of this attractive volume consists of color illustrations of Jesuit publications, and high-resolution facsimiles of all the maps included in the Nouvel atlas de la Chine. It is hoped that this significant contribution to Jesuit studies is an inaugural effort preceding more expansive studies that will include other important Jesuit cartography such as the maps of Guilio Aleni and Adam Schall von Bell, whose contributions do not appear in this volume.