The first appearance of Giuseppe Rosaccio's influential map of China (Cordier), to illustrate the work of Gonzalez de Mendoza, showing Korea as a peninsula.

Juan González de Mendoza (1545-1618) was a Spanish bishop and briefly one of Europe's leading authorities on China. Although he never in fact visited the East himself, González published a 'Historia de las cosas más notables, ritos y costumbres del gran reyno de la China' - (The History of the most notable things, rites and customs of the Great Kingdom of China) (1585). It was based on the journals of Spanish explorer Miguel de Luarca, who had made a journey to Ming China five years earlier.

Accompanying excerpts from González's descriptive text is a woodcut map of China by Rosaccio. The Venetian Rosaccio was primarily a physician, serving Grand Duke Cosimo II in Florence from 1607. He was also a prolific author, however, the majority of his forty written works concerning geography and exploration. For the 'Historia...de la China' he produced this iconic map that would help shape the European perception of China for several decades, not least through its influence on the work of cartographers such as the de Jodes. It is the first map to show Korea as a peninsula, in contrast to the cartographic myth of the Korean island that persisted for centuries to come.

Although it was soon superseded by the research and experiences of Jesuit missionaries in the early seventeenth century, and despite accusations of plagiarism from the work of Bernardino de Escalante, the 'Historia...de la China' was a great publication success, with an Italian translation appearing in 1586 and an English version two years later. The present example is one of these rare Italian editions, published in 1589, in this case by Giovanni Rossi, with another issue published simultaneously, in Bologna and Florence, by Francesco Tosi. Founded in 1633, the de Rossi printing press was the most important and prolific in Rome during the seventeenth century. Just before the death of its founder, Giuseppe de Rossi (1570-1639), it was inherited by his son Giovanni Giacomo (1627-1691).

Rare: apparently the only known example issued by Rossi, with only the Tosi issue recorded in commerce (2011), and in the New York Public Library.