A selection of western rare books on China, including the first English edition of Gonzalez de Mendoza's Historie of the Great and Mightie Kingdome of China (London, 1588), the great Blaeu atlas of China (Amsterdam, 1655), de Guignes' massive Chinese/Latin/French dictionary commissioned by Napoleon (Paris, 1813) and two fifteenth-century books, Dionysios' De Situ Orbis Habitabilis (Venice, 1478) containing some of the earliest references to "Thina" from ancient literature, and Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae (Venice, 1483), the great encyclopedia with its important world map and the forerunner of modern organisation of data (which is why Isidore is the patron saint of the Internet).
