De L’Isle’s detailed and exceptional map of South-East Asia showing both the East Sea and the Sea of Korea. An updated example of this noteworthy map of East Asia and the Indian subcontinent was published by France’s foremost eighteenth-century cartographer, Guillaume De L’Isle. Here present in edition by one of Delisle's successors Dezauche.
The map was foundational; it was studied and adopted by other mapmakers for a half-century after its publication.
The map covers much of Asia, from China and Japan, south to New Guinea and the Moluccas, west through Malaysia and Indonesia to what is today's Vietnam and Thailand, and India. Dotted lines mark political boundaries. There is a simple title cartouche in the top center, with a quadruple scale bar in the upper right corner.
The map is thickly detailed with settlements, geographic features, and ethnographic notes. For example, on the island of Borneo, the third-largest island in the world, a note reads, “Pays de Mahometans,” or country of Muslims. Islam arrived on the island in the tenth century via Muslim traders; it quickly spread around the island, especially under the sultanates of Brunei and Sulu.
While most of the outlines of the continent appear familiar to the modern eye, the landmass north of Japan is curious. Here, it is called “Terre de Yeco ou d’Eso.” Yeco is a reference to Jesso, a feature included on many seventeenth and eighteenth-century maps. Historically, Eso (Jesso, Yedso, Yesso) refers to the island of Hokkaido. It varies on maps from a small island to a near-continent-sized mass that stretches from Asia to Alaska.
Ever cautious, De L’Isle has left the southernmost tip of the land open, as is the northernmost tip of Japan, as contemporary geographers thought they might be connected.
This map is a useful reference to Asia’s past and was skillfully executed by France’s foremost geographer. It is an important work, which would be copied by other mapmakers for more than fifty years.

Guillaume De L'Isle (1675-1726) is probably the greatest figure in French cartography. Having learned geography from his father Claude, by the age of eight or nine he could draw maps to demonstrate ancient history. He studied mathematics and astronomy under Cassini, from whom he received a superb grounding in scientific cartography—the hallmark of his work. His first atlas was published in ca. 1700. In 1702 he was elected a member of the Academie Royale des Sciences and in 1718 he became Premier Geographe du Roi.
De L'Isle's work was important as marking a transition from the maps of the Dutch school, which were highly decorative and artistically orientated, to a more scientific approach. He reduced the importance given to the decorative elements in maps, and emphasized the scientific base on which they were constructed.
His maps of the newly explored parts of the world reflect the most up-to-date information available and did not contain fanciful detail in the absence of solid information. It can be fairly said that he was truly the father of the modern school of cartography at the commercial level.
De L’Isle also played a prominent part in the recalculation of latitude and longitude, based on the most recent celestial observations. His major contribution was in collating and incorporating this latitudinal and longitudinal information in his maps, setting a new standard of accuracy, quickly followed by many of his contemporaries. Guillaume De L’Isle’s work was widely copied by other mapmakers of the period, including Chatelain, Covens & Mortier, and Albrizzi.