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One of the earliest Western maps showing details of northern and central Vietnam appeared in Father Alexander de Rhodes' 'Histoire du royaume de Tunquin', published in Rome in 1650.<br/><br/> This map is from the French edition, published a year later in Lyon. Oriented with the north to the right, 'Regnu Annam' shows the extent of seventeenth-century Vietnam, then divided between two rival dynasties, one in the north and the other in central Vietnam. Remnants of the Cham kingdom, eventually destroyed by the Vietnamese, still exist in the south.<br/><br/> To the west, are the highlands occupied by 'Rumoi' (upland minority groups, later called "montagnards" by the French). The limited Western knowledge of the interior is illustrated by the large region labeled 'Solitudo'.
Alexander de Rhodes was born in Avignon, France. He entered the novitiate of the Society of Jesus in Rome on 24 April 1612 to dedicate his life to missionary work. He arrived in Indochina about 1619. A Jesuit mission had been established in Hanoi in 1615; Rhodes arrived there in 1620. He spent ten years in and around the Court at Hanoi during the rule of Trịnh Tùng and Trịnh Tráng.<br/><br/> While he was in Vietnam, he wrote the first Vietnamese Catechism and he published the first Portuguese-Latin-Vietnamese dictionary. This dictionary was later used widely by many Vietnamese scholars to create the new Vietnamese writing system, largely using the Roman alphabet - still used today and now called Quốc Ngữ (national language).