The first map of China and Japan printed in Europe

An important map of China, the first 'modern' map of the region, which includes Tibet, Tartary and Japan. Although it was published in an edition of Ptolemy's 'Geographia', it was not a reduction of a map from the Waldseemuller edition of 1513, but a new one prepared for a new 'Chronica mundi' being written by Waldseemuller. The title, as above, is on the reverse, with a descriptive text in Latin surrounded by woodcuvt columns.. Waldseemuller expanded the Ptolemaic map of the Far East by adding information on Tartary and Japan gleaned from the accounts of Marco Polo. Japan is a large island called Zipangri, a name derived from the Chinese 'Land of the Rising Sun', which Polo learned about from the Chinese, long before the first recorded European visit to Japan, the landing of the Portuguese Alvarado in Okinawa, 1542, seven years after this map was printed..