Leiden, A. W. Sythoff, 1855. Large 4to (28.7 x 20.7 cm). Title page with finely engraved vignette; xv, 242 pp.; hand-coloured lithographed frontispiece and 25 other hand-coloured lithographed and tissue-guarded plates; large, triple-folded coloured double map of Java, Madoera and Bawean. Original green embossed cloth. Spine and front board rich gilt with floral patterns and ethnographical vignettes. Yellow endpapers. All edges gilt.

One of the best-illustrated works on Java and the Javanese of the 19th-century. Copies with merely tinted plates, as well as an abridged edition with fewer plates, exist too. This, however, is the rare full colour original. The French artist Ernest Alfred Hardouin (born 1820) did not live to see the work published - he died in Batavia in 1853 (or Januaty 1854, as stated by Haks and Maris). The author, Wilhelm Leonard Ritter (1799-1862) travelled widely across the Malayan Archipelago and is regarded as one of the most prolific 19th-century writers on the Dutch East Indies. In his early life he was a high-ranking civil servant in Borneo and Sumatra with a dubious reputation. Boards rubbed and slightly soiled, especially at extremities; binding a bit weak, with the rear inner joint starting; scattered foxing, but mainly in the margins and tissue-guards, otherwise a good, complete copy. Bastin and Brommer, 301; Haks and Maris, p. 112; Landwehr, 301.