Partie Meridionale de l'Inde en deux presqu'isles..

An uncommon late printing of the Sanson's important mid-seventeenth century map of India and Southeast Asia, with the engraved date 1703 (apparently the second and last state of the plate). At a scale of about 1:9,000,000, it covers most of modern India, Bangladesh and Burma, the whole of Sri Lanka, Thailand, Malaysia, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and parts of Indonesia and China, showing the cities and smaller settlements, rivers and mountain chains, as well as the borders of the seventeenth-century kingdoms and other major political divisions, most of them further subdivided.
With decorative title and imprint in a cartouche at the foot in the form of a cloth in an enormous shell floating on the sea; with the equator and Tropic of Cancer marked and latitude and longitude indications in the borders.
It was engraved by J. Somer for the elder Nicolas Sanson, dated 1654 and with a privilege for twenty years, and appeared in Sanson's 1658 Cartes generales de toutes les parties du monde and later editions. It was originally sold by Pierre Mariette, but his name was removed when the date in the plate was changed to 1703, "chez autheur" presumably meaning the map was then sold by Pierre Moullart-Sanson. In spite of later developments in the cartography of the region the map was not extensively revised, so it reflects the historical situation and the state of cartographic knowledge in the middle of the seventeenth century.
The map remained in use after Moulart-Sanson's death in 1730, when the firm descended to his nephew Gilles Robert (1688-1766), who reprinted Sanson's seventeenth-century maps from the original plates and added new ones of his own.
The paper of the present copy is watermarked "P|[double heart]|GOVRBEYRE MOYEN|AUVERGNE 1742" = chaplet, and the map was formerly bound with others dating from c. 1742-1745, including other late printings of seventeenth-century Sanson maps and maps by Gilles Robert on similar P. Gourbeyre paper.
Of considerable historical interest for the state of European knowledge of India and Southeast Asia in the mid-seventeenth century.
Reference: BMC Printed Maps XII, col. 865? (perhaps the present map, but described as if it were a 1703 version of Pastoreau, Sanson V, map 8); Cat. Nat. Mar. Mus. 271, map 11; Nordenskiöld 275, vol. 1, map 13; Pastoureau, Sanson V, map 9 (all dated 1654).