D'Anville challenged mapmaking of his era

Detail of d'Anville's map of China.

It is the birthday of French mapmaker Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville (1697), who is credited with creating a revolution in the cartography and geography fields by challenging existing perceptions of his era about world geography and remapping vast areas, including China and the countries of pre-Christian civilization such as Egypt and Greece. Unlike his predecessors who creatively invented what they did not know, d'Anville simply left blank areas for which there was no documented information. He also wrote extensively about his source material, a practice unprecedented at the time. D'Anville produced 211 maps and some 78 dissertations and memoirs. He served as first geographer to the king of France.