- Title: L'Empire de la Chine
- Author: Didier Robert de Vaugondy
- Date: 1754
- Medium: Hand-colored copperplate engraving
- Condition: Very Good Plus - light age toning and foxing, issued center fold
- Inches: 21 1/2 x 19 1/2 [Platemark]
- Centimeters: 54.61 x 49.53 [Platemark]
- Product ID: 224029
Hand colored map of China from Robert de Vaugondy's Atlas Universale. Shows provinces with major cities, lakes, and rivers. Elaborate title cartouche in lower right corner with European depictions of China's people, flora, fauna, dwellings, and pottery. Scale cartouche lower left corner.
Didier Robert de Vaugondy (c. 1723-1786) was an 18th-century French geographer and cartographer who, along with his father Gilles Robert de Vaugondy, was a leading figure in the mapmaking industry in Paris during this period. Didier came from a family of cartographers, as his father Gilles Robert de Vaugondy (1688-1766) was a mathematics professor and mapmaker who had inherited a share of the Nicolas Sanson family's cartographic material. Together, Gilles and Didier worked collaboratively on maps and globes, with Gilles often signing as "M. Robert" and Didier commonly using "Robert de Vaugondy" or adding "fils" (son) to his name.
In 1757, the family Vaugondy published the influential Atlas Universel, integrating older sources with more modern surveyed maps and verifying latitudes and longitudes with astronomical observations. Didier was later appointed geographer to King Louis XV in 1760. Didier Robert de Vaugondy's maps and globes were known for their artistic engraving style and attention to detail. He employed a complicated process of gluing copperplate-printed gores onto a plaster-finished papier-mâché core to create globes of various sizes. As a prominent cartographer of his era, Didier Robert de Vaugondy made significant contributions to the field, including serving as a royal censor for works related to geography, navigation and travel. His maps and those produced with his father continue to be valuable resources for studying 18th-century cartography.