1860 Baikodo Ukiyo-e Map of Nagasaki, Japan

A colorful c. 1860 ukiyo-e woodblock map of Nagasaki, published by Baikōdō. It displays the port city in the wake of its opening to foreign trade as a treaty port, superseding its earlier role as Japan's outlet to the world via exclusive trade with Chinese and Dutch merchants.

A Closer Look

Oriented towards the northwest, this map covers both shores of Nagasaki Bay, recording streets, bridges, temples, shrines, agricultural fields (田), mountains, and other features. Both Japanese and foreign ships appear in the bay, some of the latter being steamships. Dejima (出島), an artificial island near center, was Japan's only open port to the Western world for most of the Tokugawa period (1600 - 1868); the Dutch were granted exclusive trading rights and Dejima retains a Dutch flag atop a tall flagpole here. To the south of Dejima is the Tōjinyashiki (唐人屋敷), a similar quarter reserved for Chinese merchants, as well as an area marked Tōjinyashiki 'New Area' (Shinchi 新地), which developed into Nagasaki's Chinatown.

The area southwest of Dejima is where foreign warehouses were set up in the months preceding this map's publication. Foreign flags, warehouses, and even some churches can be seen here. Today, the area is home to a museum and gardens named Glover Gardens, after Thomas Blake Glover (1838 - 1912), a British merchant who played a prominent role among the foreign community in Nagasaki at the time. At the bottom and bottom-left are tables of distances between different points in Nagasaki, and between Nagasaki and major Japanese cities and ports, as well as a brief description of the port's history as an outlet for trade with Chinese and Dutch merchants.

Opening the Window a Little More

From the 1630s until the 1850s, the Tokugawa Shogunate pursued sakoku ('locked country') policies, restricting foreign trade to Chinese and Dutch merchants at Nagasaki. The shogunate was particularly concerned about the potential spread of Christianity, which in the 16th - 17th centuries had gained a foothold in southern Japan, where the Tokugawa were relatively weak. But after Japan's forcible opening at the hands of the Americans in the 1850s, culminating in the 1858 Treaty of Amity and Commerce (also known as the Harris Treaty), Nagasaki was one of five ports opened to foreign trade in 1859. In the following years, foreign merchants from multiple nations joined the Dutch and Japanese in Nagasaki, and the city became an even more important conduit for foreign ideas and knowledge. As the Tokugawa had feared all along, southern daimyo, especially from nearby Chōshū and Satsuma Domains, used these foreign connections to plot the downfall of the shogunate, which they achieved in 1868.

Publication History and Census

A map with this title and format was printed as early as 1802 by Kōjudō (耕寿堂), which is credited here. The present map was an enlarged reprint of the original by Baikōdō (梅香堂), with added features such as the foreign ships and warehouses mentioned above, which also help date it to c. 1860. A map of this title dated c. 1860 is noted among the holdings of the Library of Congress and the University of California Berkeley in the OCLC, though the example held by UC Berkeley has a slightly different format, with an additional, smaller sheet appended to those seen here, covering some of the islands southwest of Nagasaki. The University of British Columbia and Waseda University also hold examples matching the present one, which are not listed in the OCLC.