Description of Ukraine

The Description of Ukraine, in its original French title Description d'Ukranie (Ukrainian: «Опис України», romanized: Opys Ukrajiny), is a book written by the French engineer and military cartographer Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan, who served the Polish king Władysław IV Vasa from the early 1630s to 1648.

The original 1651 edition of the book covered the city of Kiev, the Cossacks (in two chapters), Ukraine's nobility and its peasants, other cities and environs of the region, the peninsula of Crimea and the Crimean Tatars. Also depicted were the local customs, medicine, and fauna The revised and expanded edition of 1660 additionally covered the climate of Ukraine and the Easter celebrations in the region. Also included was an expanded description of Poland, with an emphasis on the Polish nobility and the Polish military equipment. The revised edition was dedicated to John II Casimir Vasa. At least 26 editions of the book (in at least nine different languages) were published from 1651 to 1981.

The importance of this work lies in the discovery of Ukrainian lands, their identity and history for science and the general public in Europe. For the first time, Guillaume de Beauplan described Ukrainian life, as well as the life of the ordinary population of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. Beauplan presented the Cossacks as a phenomenon of the revival of chivalry in the Ukrainian lands, in contrast to the Polish propaganda of the time.