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This finely engraved and vividly hand-colored plan shows the fortified Danish settlement of Tranquebar (modern Tharangambadi, Tamil Nadu) on the southeastern coast of India. At once a detailed town plan and a coastal prospect, it documents the urban fabric of Denmark’s primary colonial outpost in India and the earliest sustained Protestant missionary effort in Asia.

At left, the quadrangular citadel of Dansborg commands the river, its four bastions named after members of the Danish royal family. To the east, a walled and bastioned enceinte encloses the town, its street grid carefully annotated with numbers and letters keyed to an extensive legend. This index identifies the Danish East India Company’s administrative and commercial buildings, the Governor’s house, churches, schools, private dwellings, missionary gardens, and the houses of native Christian converts. Many entries refer specifically to the operations of the Danish-Halle Mission, whose members provided the map’s original survey.

Below the plan, a coastal prospect of Tranquebar as seen from the Bay of Bengal presents the settlement’s distinctive profile: red-tiled roofs, palm trees, a flag flying over the citadel, and a calm shoreline protected by the offshore bar. Ribbon title banners and twin text panels repeat the key to the plan and label major landmarks in the view.

The map’s production is credited in both the Latin and German cartouches to “I.E.R.” working from measurements taken by the Danish Evangelical missionaries. Matthäus Seutter, Imperial Geographer in Augsburg, engraved and issued the map for inclusion in his Atlas Novus and later Atlas Minor. The plate is datable to ca. 1730, and it ranks among the earlier printed plans of a European colonial city in India.

Tranquebar was established by King Christian IV in 1620 and remained under Danish control until 1845. The Danish-Halle Mission, founded in 1706, made it a center of early Lutheran missionary activity, education, and vernacular printing.