Neueste Karte von Hinter Indien.

Description

This is sheet 17 from Meyer’s Grosser Zeitungs-Atlas, drawn by Major Carl Radefeld in 1850 and published by the Bibliographisches Institut in Hildburghausen. It presents Hinter Indien, the German term for Further India or Indochina, covering the entire mainland Southeast Asian peninsula from the Ganges delta and Tibet in the north to the tip of the Malay Peninsula and the northern coast of Borneo in the south.

Within a decade of its publication, French forces would begin the conquest of Cochinchina, Britain would seize Lower Burma, and the political map Radefeld drew would be rendered obsolete.

The Map in Detail

The color-coded legend, headed Farben-Erklärung, distinguishes British possessions, Burma, Siam, Tibetan territory, Annam, Laos, Malay states, the Chinese border zone, and independent Indo-Chinese principalities and peoples, giving the map an explicitly political as well as geographical character. British India and its Burmese frontier are shown in pink along the western edge, with Calcutta and the Ganges delta visible at the left margin. Siam occupies the center of the sheet in yellow, its boundaries with Burma to the west and with Annam and Cambodia to the east carefully delineated. The Laotian principalities fill the upper center, while Cambodia appears in the middle right, and Cochinchina runs down the eastern coast.

The Malay Peninsula extends to the south, with the Andaman and Nicobar Islands in the Bay of Bengal to the west and the South China Sea (Südchinesisches Meer) to the east. Borneo appears at the lower right corner. A substantial comparative scale panel in the lower left provides equivalencies between German geographic miles, English miles, French leagues, and several other national systems of measurement, a practical feature reflecting the atlas’s international distribution through Amsterdam, Paris, and Philadelphia.

Historical Context

In 1850, the great kingdoms of mainland Southeast Asia, Siam, Burma, Annam, and the Cambodian and Laotian principalities still existed as recognizable independent polities, however much their sovereignty was being eroded at the edges by British and nascent French pressure. The First Anglo-Burmese War of 1824 to 1826 had already cost Burma its Arakan and Tenasserim coastal provinces to Britain, and the Second Anglo-Burmese War, which would deliver Rangoon and Lower Burma to the East India Company, was only two years away when Radefeld drew this map.

France’s serious engagement with Cochinchina began in 1858, culminating in the establishment of the French protectorate over Cambodia in 1863 and the eventual creation of French Indochina. Siam alone would preserve its independence through the colonial period, navigating between British and French pressure with remarkable diplomatic skill. Radefeld’s map, with its careful differentiation of territorial authority across the peninsula, records the last moment at which these distinctions still broadly corresponded to political reality on the ground. The terminology itself, Hinter Indien, Further India, reflects a European geographical imagination that understood the entire region as an extension of the Indian subcontinent, an understanding that French colonialism would replace with the concept of Indochine as a distinct political entity.

Publication History and Census

This map was published as sheet 17 of Meyer’s Grosser Zeitungs-Atlas by the Bibliographisches Institut in Hildburghausen in 1850, with distribution through Amsterdam, Paris, and Philadelphia. Individual sheets are occasionally encountered as extracts from bound volumes.