Juan González de Mendoza, Historia del gran reyno de la China (Rome, 1585)

The book that told early modern Europe what China was. Compiled at Rome in 1585 by an Augustinian who never entered China, out of the reports of friars who had, it was reprinted and translated across the continent within four years, carried an itinerary of the New World bound in with it, and argued in print — with a printed Chinese specimen to hand — that printing had reached Europe from China rather than beginning there.