The David Parry Southeast Asian Map Collection

The David Parry SE Asian Map Collection forms the main body of the current map exhibition in National Library on the early maps of SE Asia and Singapore, entitled 'The Land of Gold and Spices'.

The entire collection comprises 254 maps of Southeast Asia, with emphasis on the islands that make up present day Indonesia. The oldest map in the collection is a 1478 Ptolemaic map of South East Asia, Tabula Asiae XI from Arnold Buckinck's edition of Ptolemy's Geopgraphia [1]. Other maps from mapmakers such as Fries, Ruscelli, Ortelius, Linschoten, Mercator, Dudley, Blaeu, De Wit, Coronelli, Thornton, Moll, Bellin, Bonne, Valentijn etc. traced the development of the mapping of Southeast Asia from the 1500s to 1800s.

The collection was acquired by the National Library of Singapore at a Sotheby's auction in May 2012 at a price of GBP223,250 (or about SGD448,700 at the conversion rate in May 2012).

Snapshot from Sotheby's webpage. The map shown is one of the highlight of the collection:  A Map  of the East Indies and adjacent countries; with the settlements, factories and territories, explaining what belongs to England, France, Holland, Denmark, Portugal &c. by Herman Moll,  London, 1717.

David Parry is a soil scientist and has worked and lived in  Indonesia (the former Dutch East Indies) for much of his life. He started to assemble his map collection in the early 1980s. He is the author of the book The Cartography of The East Indian Islands: Insulae Indiae Orientalis (Countrywide Editions, London, 2005).

References
[1] With the acquisition, this map became the oldest article in the collection of National Library of Singapore, according to the exhibition curator, Tan Huism.