Leiden and the Dissemination of Asian Cartography

Abstract

Since the foundation of Leiden University in 1575 much attention was paid on Oriental cultures. Nowadays, vast collections on the South-, East- and Southeast-Asia are kept in the collections of Leiden University Libraries. An important, and for sure an attractive, part of these collections consists of cartographic material. On the one hand these are European, especially Dutch, products, largely made by the VOC (Dutch East India Company) and later by the Topographic Service in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies. On the other hand, documents and maps of oriental origin were collected by scholars in Leiden. In this paper the role of Leiden, and Leiden University in particular, in the production, trade, consumption and preservation of Asian cartography is examined.

Who collected these maps and atlases? What aims defined their collecting strategies? How ended these maps up at Leiden University? Various personal and institutional collectors from the late sixteenth to the early twenty-first century will pass in review. Among them famous collectors like Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796–1866), and Johannes Tiberius Bodel Nijenhuis (1797–1872) and institutions like the Royal Tropical Institute and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies. With the addition of the map collections of the two institutes mentioned above, Leiden’s map collection almost doubled in size in the past years. The incorporation of the libraries of these institutions made Leiden University Libraries one of the leading collections on Asia, and the largest on Indonesia worldwide.