Histoire du grand Royavme de la Chine, sitvé avx Indes orientales, duisée en deux parties : Contenant en la Premiere, la situation, antiquité, fertilité ; religion, ceremonies, sacrifices ; rois, magistrats, mœurs, vs, loix, & autres choses memorables dudit royaume : Et en la Seconde, trois voyages faits vers iceluy en l'an 1577. 1579. & 1581. auec les singularitez plus remarquables y veuës & entenduës : ensemble vn Itineraire du nouueau monde, & le descouurement du nouueau Mexique en l'an 1583. Faite en espagnol (…) & mise en françois auec des additions en marge, & deux Indices, Par Lvc de la Porte, Parisien, docteur és Droits. A Monseignevr le Chancelier

First edition of the French translation by the Parisian jurist Luc de La Porte, doctor of law (cf. Cordier, Sinica, 12; Sabin 27780; Palau 105509; Alden, European Americana, 588/37; Leclerc [1878], 258; Streit IV, 1999; Atkinson, 339).

Paris, Jérémie Périer, 1588.

Two parts bound in one octavo volume: 12 unnumbered leaves, 112 leaves, 323 leaves - with errors in foliation - and 25 unnumbered leaves of table and errata.

Contemporary full brown calf, spine with five raised bands decorated with gilt double panels, red edges. Joints and spine restored; gilt fillets partly rubbed on the board edges. Small marginal brown stain at the beginning of the volume; marginal tear to page 62.

The copy bears an early manuscript ownership inscription on the title-page: “Cadt. Berdeilh”. It is accompanied, on the flyleaf, by an autograph letter signed by Marie de Berdeilh, dated Mirepoix, 10 January, together with an acknowledgement of debt in the same hand on the front pastedown. These elements preserve traces of a southern French family provenance which has not been precisely identified. Later, and better documented, provenance: Gaston Héliot (1879-1936), who appears to have continued his father’s Parisian trade in Chinese porcelain and cloisonné enamels. He was vice-president of the Société des Amis du musée Cernuschi in the 1920s and donated several Chinese objects to the museum between 1922 and 1924.

This French translation made available to a French readership one of the most influential accounts of China published in Europe in the sixteenth century.

Composed by the Augustinian Juan González de Mendoza -born at Torrecilla en Cameros in 1545 and later bishop of Popayán, where he died in 1618 - the work arose from a thwarted mission. Sent by Philip II in 1580 as ambassador to the Chinese Empire, Mendoza saw his journey halted in New Spain, where he remained for three years without obtaining from the viceroy permission to proceed. It was from this enforced delay that his book emerged, compiled from Spanish and Portuguese sources rather than from direct observation. The text nevertheless became, from its first appearance in Rome in 1585, an immense European success, soon translated into Italian, German, English, Dutch and Latin.

Published in Paris three years after the Spanish original, Luc de La Porte’s translation is of further interest for incorporating, in its second part, two travel narratives expressly announced on the title-page. The first is that of the Franciscan Martín Ignacio de Loyola, a kinsman of Saint Ignatius who entered history as the man who completed two consecutive circumnavigations of the globe in opposite directions. The second, of particular importance, concerns the Spanish expedition led by Antonio de Espejo to New Mexico between November 1582 and September 1583: one of the very earliest printed European disseminations of this exploration.

A remarkably rare first French edition of a foundational text in Western sinology, enriched with a highly important American dossier on the discovery of New Mexico; a fine copy in contemporary calf, with a documented provenance in the great Parisian trade in Chinese works of art in the twentieth century.