Japan, China and the Indian Ocean
The three fast boats under Hokusai’s Great Wave. Hiroshige’s ferries and rafts on the rivers of Edo. The Portuguese carracks of the Nanban screens, Perry’s squadron, the river boats of the Qingming scroll and the war boats of the Mughal court.
This chapter of Ships in Paintings holds 60 works. For each one you will find the artist and, wherever the records allow, the date and where the original is kept; then what the ship brings to the picture, and the real ship behind it when there is one. See all 1,331 works on one page.
Marea can build any of these ships as a scale model, with the maximum detail the scale permits, finished to be inspected. We can build her as the artist saw her: the same rig, the same sails set, the same colours. It isn’t a copy of a painting. It’s the ship, stepping out of it.
This database was put together by Ai Refloat™, Marea’s own artificial intelligence, from the records of museums, maritime archives and published sources. Ai Refloat is still young & like any teenager, it can be a little volatile and unpredictable at times, but above all, it is learning fast. So this list may well contain mistakes and we welcome the input of everyone who knows these paintings, photographs and ships better than we do: listening, correcting and learning is one of the many ways we work towards perfection in this craft.
When no free image of a work exists, we show instead the museum or the place where the original can be seen.
Have you spotted a mistake? Tell us which painting, photograph or ship, and we will amend it accordingly. Tell us here
The works
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Grain barge shooting the Rainbow Bridge Unnamed
Along the River During the Qingming Festival (Qingming shanghe tu), Northern Song dynasty, early 12th century
Artist Zhang Zeduan (1085 to 1145)
Where to see it Palace Museum, Beijing
Medium Handscroll; ink and colour on silk
This five-metre scroll counts 814 people and 28 boats, and its dramatic heart is a boat. At the great bridge, the centre of the whole composition, a big river craft comes in at an awkward angle with its tow mast not fully lowered, threatening to crash into the bridge; the crowds shout and gesture, and someone near the top of the arch lowers a rope to the crew. An inscription of 1186, based on a catalogue by the Jin imperial curator Zhang Zhu, says Zhang Zeduan took particular pleasure in depicting boats, and the whole city seems to hold its breath over one mistake in seamanship.
“He mastered jiehua and took particular pleasure in depicting boats, carts, markets, bridges, city walls, and streets.”
The vessels The boats are the fishing boats, passenger ferries and larger cargo craft of the river through the Northern Song capital, present-day Kaifeng; men on the bank hauled the larger ships.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Indian Ocean sewn-plank ship Unnamed
Abu Zayd and al-Harith Sailing to Oman, from the Maqamat of al-Hariri (Maqama 39), the Schefer Hariri, 1237
Artist Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti (13th century)
Where to see it Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (MS Arabe 5847, fol. 119v)
Medium Manuscript illustration
Al-Wasiti copied and illustrated this manuscript of al-Hariri's Assemblies in 1237, probably in Baghdad, and it is probably the most applauded of all illustrated copies. In the thirty-ninth tale the rogue Abu Zayd and the narrator take ship for Oman, and al-Wasiti gives a detailed picture of a sea-going ship: the stitching that joins her planks, the stern rudder, a grapnel anchor, sailors bailing, a lookout boy aloft and the merchants peering from their cabin. Beneath the wit of the story lies a precise record of how such a ship was built and worked.
The vessels A sewn-plank ship, her planks joined by stitching rather than nails, with a stern rudder and grapnel anchor, carrying merchants on the voyage to Oman; the vessel is not named.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Yahya ibn Mahmud al-Wasiti, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Mongol and Japanese ships at the Battle of Kōan Unnamed
Illustrated Account of the Mongol Invasion (Mōko Shūrai Ekotoba), second scroll, c. 1293
Artist Unknown painters, commissioned by Takezaki Suenaga (1246 to 1314)
Where to see it Museum of the Imperial Collections, Tokyo Imperial Palace
Medium Handscroll; ink and colour on paper
The samurai Takezaki Suenaga commissioned these scrolls to record his deeds against the Mongol invaders, and in the second he goes to sea. Turned away from a general's ship, he finds a boat, takes off his helmet and sets out with other warriors to board a Mongol vessel in the Battle of Kōan of 1281, fighting hand to hand on her deck. The scrolls contain some of the earliest artistic depictions of the Mongol invasions. They date themselves to 1293, were retouched many times, and were lost before being rediscovered in the eighteenth century.
The vessels The Mongol Yuan fleets attacked Japan in 1274 and 1281; at Kōan in 1281 Japanese warriors in small boats went out to raid the invasion ships.
Sources Wikipedia
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Imperial dragon boats on Jinming Lake Unnamed
Dragon Boat Regatta on Jinming Lake, 14th century
Artist After Wang Zhenpeng (active c. 1275 to 1330)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (66.174a)
Medium Handscroll; ink on silk
The scroll records a regatta sponsored by Emperor Huizong on Jinming Lake, in an imperial park of the Northern Song capital at Kaifeng. It is a showpiece of jiehua, ruled-line painting, the meticulous technique for architecture that Wang Zhenpeng perfected, and here it serves the boats: great dragon-prowed craft, oarsmen in rows, pavilions afloat. Wang painted the composition for Emperor Renzong in 1310 and again for the Grand Elder Princess Sennge in 1323; at least five other versions exist, and the Met's is a later fourteenth-century copy of that famous design.
“The picture is a remarkable example of jiehua, or ‘ruled-line,’ painting, the intricate style of depicting architecture perfected by Wang Zhenpeng.”
The vessels Dragon boat races were traditionally held on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month in memory of the minister Qu Yuan; the race shown was held on the third day of the third month at Kaifeng in the reign of Huizong (1101 to 1125).
Sources The Met · Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
The Ship of Shi'ism Myth and legend
Firdausi's Parable of the Ship of Shi'ism, folio 18v from the Shahnama (Book of Kings) of Shah Tahmasp, c. 1530 to 1535
Artist Attributed to Mirza 'Ali (c. 1509 to 1575)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1970.301.1)
Medium Opaque watercolour, ink, silver and gold on paper
In the introduction to the Book of Kings, Firdausi imagines God launching seventy ships into a stormy sea, each carrying the followers of a faith. For Shah Tahmasp's great Shahnama, probably the most fully illustrated manuscript of the epic ever produced, Mirza 'Ali painted the finest of them. Beneath a red canopy sit the Prophet and his successor 'Ali, with 'Ali's sons Hasan and Husain close by, while a sailor climbs the mast, oarsmen work in the boats alongside and fish swim in the dark water below. The ship is salvation made visible, a vessel of faith riding safely on the storm.
The legend An allegorical vessel from Firdausi's preface to the Shahnama, painted in Safavid Tabriz as a richly fitted ship with a canopied deckhouse, a mast with a red sail and a crew.
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Bridge of boats outside Agra fort Unnamed
Akbar's Adventures with the Elephant Hawa'i, from the Akbarnama (double page composition), c. 1590 to 1595
Artist Basawan (design) and Chetar (painting), Mughal court workshop
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.2:21-1896 and IS.2:22-1896)
Medium Opaque watercolour and gold on paper
In 1561, outside the fort of Agra, the young emperor Akbar mounted the royal elephant Hawa'i, one of the strongest and most difficult in his stables, and pitted him against another fierce elephant, Ran Bagha. Ran Bagha fled across a bridge of boats over the Jumna with Hawa'i and his rider in pursuit, and the bridge lurched and collapsed under their weight. Basawan designed this double page for the official history of the reign and makes the boats carry the drama, tipping under the animals as servants dive into the river. On the facing page the prime minister Ataga Khan and the court raise their hands in prayer for the emperor's safety.
The vessels A bridge of boats is a line of river craft moored side by side and decked over to carry a road across a river; this one crossed the Jumna outside Agra fort.
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Royal river boat of Mariam Makani Unnamed
Akbar's Mother Mariam Makani Travelling by Boat to Agra, from the Akbarnama, c. 1590 to 1595
Artist Tulsi (outline) and Durga (painting), Mughal court workshop
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.2:4-1896)
Medium Opaque watercolour and gold on paper
The official history of Akbar's reign shows the royal ladies travelling from Delhi to Agra by river. The women themselves are hidden inside curtained structures on each boat, but the boat at the centre, with its extra tier and red curtains, the colour of royalty, may well have carried the emperor's mother, Mariam Makani. The painters make the vessel itself the sign of her rank: we never see her, only the boat that carries her and the care lavished on it. Among the battles and hunts of the Akbarnama, it is a rare quiet voyage.
The vessels A Mughal royal river boat with a great sail and a two tier curtained structure, travelling with other curtained boats from Delhi to Agra; the vessel is not named.
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Mughal war boats on the Ganges Unnamed
Shuja'at Khan Pursuing Asaf Khan on the Ganges, from the Akbarnama, c. 1590 to 1595
Artist Tulsi the Elder (outline) and Jagjivan (painting), Mughal court workshop
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (IS.2:47-1896)
Medium Opaque watercolour and gold on paper
In 1565 Akbar's vizier Asaf Khan, a highly effective general, kept back treasure seized on a successful campaign and tried to flee with his supporters across the Ganges. The emperor's forces under Shuja'at Khan caught up with him on the river, and Tulsi the Elder and Jagjivan paint the fierce clash as a fight between boats crowded with armoured men. Asaf Khan got away, and in 1567 he asked for forgiveness and received it. The page comes from the V&A's Akbarnama, thought to be the earliest illustrated copy of the text, made for Akbar himself.
The vessels Mughal river boats used as fighting craft on the Ganges in north-east India in 1565; none is named.
Image: Tulsi the Elder, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Boats of Alexander's fleet and the pirates Myth and legend
Alexander Fights a Sea Battle, folio from a Khamsa (Quintet) of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi, 1597 to 1598
Artist Dharmadas
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (13.228.32)
Medium Ink, opaque watercolour and gold on paper
In Amir Khusrau's retelling of the Alexander romance, Alexander has a tall tower built, crowned by a revolving mirror, to fight the pirates who menace the Mediterranean; Khusrau made the mirror a magical reflection of everything within sixty leagues. Dharmadas, painting for the emperor Akbar's copy of the poem, turns the ancient legend into a naval battle of his own day: turbaned men in tunics fight from crowded boats around the pale tower, one of them with a firearm, an anachronism the Met points out. The boats, with red sails and curved prows, are the boats of India put to sea in the service of a myth.
The legend Legendary vessels drawn as the boats of Mughal India, with high curved prows, single sails and crews of soldiers.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Alexander's ship on the western sea Myth and legend
Alexander is Lowered into the Sea, folio from a Khamsa (Quintet) of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi, 1597 to 1598
Artist Attributed to Mukunda, Mughal court workshop
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (13.228.27)
Medium Ink, watercolour and gold on paper
Amir Khusrau's Alexander journeys as far as the Western Isles, and at sea he is lowered into the water in a glass diving bell; in the depths an angel will foretell his death. The painter shows the moment of descent: the ship crowded with anxious men leaning over the side, the bell sinking with Alexander inside, a great fish nosing nearby, and more boats and a rocky shore beyond. Made for the emperor Akbar's copy of Amir Khusrau's Khamsa, it shows a ship as the gateway between the known world and the unknown.
The legend A legendary vessel from the Alexander romance, drawn as a Mughal sailing boat with a tall mast, a long red pennant and a planked hull.
Image: Attributed to Mukunda, Mughal court workshop, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Portuguese carrack (kurofune, the Black Ship) Unnamed
Arrival of the Southern Barbarians (Nanban byōbu), pair of six-panel folding screens, late 16th to early 17th century
Artist Kanō Naizen (1570 to 1616)
Where to see it Kobe City Museum (Important Cultural Property)
Medium Pair of six-panel folding screens; mineral pigments on gold-leafed paper
Kanō Naizen's screens are counted among the masterworks of Nanban byōbu, of which over 90 pairs survive. On the left a great ship with billowing sails leaves a fantastic foreign harbour of domes and dragons; on the right a ship has completed her voyage, cargo is unloaded and Portuguese captains are welcomed by Jesuit missionaries and Japanese converts, beside goods of pelts, silks and ceramics and a church with a crucifix on its altar. The black-hulled carrack, set against gold leaf, is the reason for everything else: trade, faith, curiosity and wealth all arrive on her deck.
The vessels The Portuguese called these ships nau do trato or nau da China; the Japanese called them kurofune, black ships, for their hulls painted black with pitch. Of about 400 to 600 tons at first and later over 1,200 or 1,600 tons, many were built of Indian teak at Goa, Bassein or Daman, and they carried Chinese silk to Japan in exchange for silver until Portuguese trade was prohibited in 1639.
Sources kobecitymuseum.jp · Wikipedia
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Portuguese carrack (kurofune) at Nagasaki Unnamed
Nanban Folding Screens (Namban byōbu), pair of six-panel screens, 16th or 17th century
Artist Attributed to Kanō Domi
Where to see it Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon (inv. 1638 Mov and 1639 Mov)
Medium Pair of six-panel folding screens; paper on wooden lattice, gold leaf, polychrome tempera, silk, lacquer and gilt copper
The Lisbon screens show the arrival of Portuguese ships at Nagasaki, and the curiosity and festive mood the black ship stirred in the port. The museum singles out the care with which the painter recorded the vessel and her cargo, alongside the Jesuit missionaries who travelled with the trade. Painted in Japan and now in Portugal, the screens have made the reverse journey of the ship they celebrate, records of the exchange that began when the Portuguese reached Japan in 1543.
“the curiosity and festive atmosphere aroused by the arrival of the black ship of the namban jin”
The vessels The Portuguese carracks of the Japan voyage grew from about 400 to 600 tons to as many as 1,200 or 1,600 tons; they sailed from Goa via Malacca and Macau to Nagasaki, the anchorage of the Portuguese from 1571, until their trade was prohibited in 1639.
Sources Google Arts & Culture · Wikipedia
Image: Attributed to Kanō Domi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Akbar's imperial barges Unnamed
Akbar's Expedition by Boat to the Eastern Provinces, from the Akbarnama, 1602 to 1604
Artist Mughal court workshop
Where to see it Philadelphia Museum of Art (1967-30-398)
In 1574 Akbar took his court and army east by river, and this page shows him on campaign. Dressed in white, with his distinctive features, the emperor sits giving orders in the centre of the second boat from the bottom. According to the chronicler Abu'l Fazl, the barges made for this expedition were veritable floating palaces, and the painter packs them with soldiers, oarsmen and attendants. The museum sees in such pages the imperial workshop fusing Persian, Indian and European ideas into a distinctive Mughal style.
“the barges made for this expedition [were] veritable floating palaces with spaces for all the court functions”
The vessels Mughal state barges were large oared river craft fitted with cabins and pavilions; Akbar used them on his 1574 campaign to the eastern provinces.
Sources Philadelphia Museum of Art · Wikipedia
Image: Mughal court workshop, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Ship of Kai Khusrau Myth and legend
Kai Khusrau Crosses the Sea, folio from a Shahnama (Book of Kings) of Firdausi, c. 1610
Artist Deccani court painter, Bijapur
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1982.476.3)
Medium Ink, opaque watercolour and gold on paper
Pursuing his enemy Afrasiyab, the hero king Kai Khusrau takes to the sea and is blown off course by a fearful storm to a place full of strange sea creatures. This small page, with its exquisite detail and lavish gold, comes from a Deccani Shahnama made around 1610 for a courtly patron at Bijapur, a place the Met identifies from its pastel palette, fantastic rocks and small white buildings. The ship rides a grey sea under two striped sails, the crowned king and his companions aboard, while fish and monsters swim around the hull and the gold panels of text frame the voyage like a treasure.
The legend A legendary ship from the Persian national epic, painted with a planked hull and two striped square sails.
Sources The Met
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Portuguese carrack (kurofune) Unnamed
Nanban Screens (Namban byōbu), pair of six-panel folding screens, early 17th century
Artist Attributed to Kanō Sanraku (1559 to 1635)
Where to see it Suntory Museum of Art, Tokyo (Important Cultural Property)
Medium Pair of six-panel folding screens; gold, ink, silk and metal on textile
Sanraku was a page to Toyotomi Hideyoshi before Kanō Eitoku adopted him into the Kanō school, and after Eitoku's death he became its head, so these screens come from the heart of Momoyama painting. The museum describes them as portraying the arrival of Westerners in Japan after guns were first imported in 1543: on the right screen a Western ship lies in port with her captain and missionaries, on the left an exotic terrace with foreign women and dogs. The black ship here is less a vessel than a wonder, the floating proof of a world beyond Japan that the Portuguese had opened and that the shogunate would soon close.
The vessels The carracks of the Portuguese Japan trade, called kurofune by the Japanese, sailed between Goa, Macao and Nagasaki from the 1540s until 1639, carrying Chinese silk in exchange for Japanese silver.
Sources Google Arts & Culture · Wikipedia
Image: Attributed to Kanō Sanraku, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Boats and prahus at the Batavia fish market Unnamed
The Castle of Batavia, Seen from Kali Besar West, c. 1662
Artist Andries Beeckman (1628 to 1664)
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-19)
Medium Oil on canvas
This painting once hung in the assembly room of the Dutch East India Company's headquarters in Amsterdam, a view of the company's Asian capital for the men who ran it. Beeckman sets a market under palm trees before the castle, and the Rijksmuseum points out that the people could never all have been there together: Japanese, Indians, formerly enslaved mardijkers in striped clothes, a Javanese fruit seller, a Chinese person fishing, Moluccans playing football with a rattan ball. The boats drawn up on the shore belong to that mixed world, and Beeckman even signed his name on an upturned boat.
“These people would never have all been together at the same time!”
The vessels Batavia, today Jakarta, was the headquarters of the Dutch East India Company in Asia; the small boats drawn up by the market are local craft, not identified by the museum.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikipedia
Image: Andries Beeckman, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
River boats of the Qing court version Unnamed
Along the River During the Qingming Festival (Qing Court Version), 1736
Artist Chen Mei, Sun Hu, Jin Kun, Dai Hong and Cheng Zhidao, painters of the Qing court
Where to see it National Palace Museum, Taipei
Medium Handscroll; ink and colour on silk
Commissioned by the Yongzheng emperor and finished after his death by five court painters, this 1736 version of Zhang Zeduan's famous scroll is quite different from the Song original. The river still carries the story from quiet countryside to crowded city, past the Rainbow Bridge and its markets, now lined with shops, through the city gates and streets to the literati gardens and the Jinming Lake at its end. Artists made hundreds of versions of the composition over the centuries, and in this one the river and its boats become a procession through a whole imagined capital.
The vessels The vessels are generic Chinese river craft of the eighteenth century as imagined by court painters, placed in a Song dynasty setting.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Junks on the Yellow River Unnamed
The Qianlong Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Four: The Confluence of the Huai and Yellow Rivers, 1770
Artist Xu Yang (1712 to after 1777) and workshop
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1984.16a to c)
Medium Handscroll; ink and colour on silk
The fourth of twelve scrolls recording the Qianlong emperor's southern inspection tour of 1751 shows him inspecting flood control on the Yellow River, at a spillway where the waters of the Huai flow into the silt-laden Yellow to carry its sediment out to sea. Double sluice gates guard the Grand Canal, and levees are faced with stone and repaired with bundles of sorghum. Across the immense patterned sweep of water, sailing junks and official boats move along the dikes, tiny against the engineering. Xu Yang used a Western-style unified perspective learned from Jesuit painters at court, and the boats give the river its scale.
The vessels The junks are the river craft of the Grand Canal and Yellow River system in the mid-eighteenth century, shown during the emperor's 1751 tour.
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Imperial flotilla on the Grand Canal Unnamed
The Qianlong Emperor's Southern Inspection Tour, Scroll Six: Entering Suzhou along the Grand Canal, 1770
Artist Xu Yang (1712 to after 1777) and assistants
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1988.350a to d)
Medium Handscroll; ink and colour on silk
Xu Yang, a native of Suzhou, was commissioned by the Qianlong emperor to record his historic 1751 tour of south China in twelve monumental handscrolls, and this is the longest of the twelve. It follows the lavish pageantry of the emperor's arrival at Suzhou along the Grand Canal, the waterway that made such tours possible, and the boats are part of the pomp, a great decorated barge hauled along by a line of trackers past houses, shops and gardens. The scroll is dated 1770, and its careful detail offers a rare view of daily life in an eighteenth-century Chinese city.
“chronicles the lavish pageantry of the emperor's arrival in Suzhou”
The vessels The Grand Canal carried grain and traffic between south China and Beijing, and it also allowed the Kangxi and Qianlong emperors to make their tours of inspection to the south; the boats shown are the imperial barges and canal craft of the 1751 tour.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Takarabune, the Treasure Ship of the Seven Lucky Gods Myth and legend
Takarabune (The Treasure Ship), c. 1775 to 1793
Artist Katsukawa Shunshō (1726 to 1793)
Where to see it Brooklyn Museum, New York (76.151.43)
Medium Woodblock print
In Japanese folklore the Seven Lucky Gods pilot the Takarabune, the Treasure Ship, through the heavens and into human ports during the first three days of the New Year, carrying the hat of invisibility, the inexhaustible purse, the magic mallet and other treasures. A print of the ship placed under the pillow on the night of 2 January was meant to bring a lucky dream, and after a bad one the print could be thrown into a river. Shunshō fits the ship into a sheet only 11.7 cm wide and nearly 70 cm tall: the gods crowd the deck beneath a great striped sail, a crane flies overhead and waves curl below the hull.
The legend A mythical ship of the Seven Lucky Gods; pictures of it are part of Japanese New Year celebrations, a custom that began among the nobility around the Muromachi period and spread to commoners in the later Edo period.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Katsukawa Shunshō, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Drawing
Chop boat (water melon boat) Unnamed
Chop Boat (Water Melon Boat), from a set of fifty paintings of Pearl River vessels, 1800 to 1820
Artist Unknown Guangzhou export painter
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (8655:4)
Medium Watercolour and ink on paper
This sheet comes from a folio of fifty paintings made in Guangzhou to show the different kinds of boat that crowded the Pearl River, pictures produced in quantity as souvenirs. It shows a chop boat, named after the chop, the official stamp showing that a cargo had cleared customs. Its round decks and sides, almost wholly enclosed by a semicircular cabin, made it look like a melon, and the Chinese called it a water melon boat. Lord Macartney, the first British ambassador to China, wrote that the river of Canton was covered with boats and vessels of every sort, and sets like this one recorded that crowd for visitors.
“the river of Canton is covered with boats and vessels of various sorts and sizes”
The vessels A Pearl River cargo boat almost entirely enclosed by a semicircular cabin, with a single mast; its name comes from the chop, the customs stamp that showed its cargo had been cleared.
Sources V&A
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where the original is kept. Photo: Christopher Hilton, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Japan, China and the East · Drawing
Lord Hastings' flotilla of pinnace budgerows Unnamed
Lord Hastings' Flotilla on the River at Buxar, with many Pinnace Budgerows, from Views by Seeta Ram from Patna to Benares, volume II, 1814 to 1815
Artist Sita Ram (active c. 1810 to 1822)
Where to see it British Library, London (Add.Or.4711)
Medium Watercolour
On 28 June 1814 the new Governor-General, Lord Moira, later Marquess of Hastings, embarked at Barrackpore in a flotilla of no fewer than 220 boats, and the Indian artist Sita Ram went with him to paint the journey up the Ganges. Here the fleet lies at Buxar, a crowd of pinnace budgerows, some with palanquins on their roofs, beneath a small British station on the cliffs; the two largest boats carried Lord and Lady Hastings and their children. Sita Ram's albums lay unknown for 150 years in the Bute collection in Scotland, and the British Library calls them a grand diorama of north India.
“The party embarked on 28 June 1814 at Barrackpore in a flotilla of no less than 220 boats.”
The vessels Budgerows were large, slow, keelless boats with long cabins divided into rooms, used for journeys on the Ganges before the railways; they carried sails but often had to be towed, covering no more than 17 to 20 miles a day.
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Dutch ship Handelmaatschappij Named ship
Dutch Residents and Japanese Women Watching the Arrival of a Dutch Ship at Dejima, 1820s
Artist Kawahara Keiga (1786 to c. 1860)
Medium Painting
Kawahara Keiga worked for some thirty years as a painter at the Dutch trading post of Dejima, and here he paints the event that mattered most in its year: the arrival of a Dutch ship. She comes in far off across the bay, towed by a long line of Japanese rowing boats, while on a rooftop lookout the Dutch residents watch: Heinrich Bürger with a telescope, Philipp Franz von Siebold in a white suit, a Javanese servant, and Siebold's Japanese partner Kusumoto Taki with their baby daughter Ine on her back. The distant ship is the island's lifeline and the whole reason these people are there.
The real ship From 1641 only Dutch and Chinese ships were allowed to trade at Nagasaki; the ship here is towed into harbour by many Japanese rowing boats.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Drawing
Kora kora of the Sultan of Tidore and Zr.Ms. Admiraal Evertsen Named ship
A Kora Kora with the Sultan of Tidore and the Dutch Ship of the Line Evertsen Firing Salutes at Tidore, 1817, c. 1820
Artist Quirijn Maurits Rudolph Ver Huell (1787 to 1860)
Where to see it Maritiem Museum Rotterdam
Ver Huell was a naval officer who also painted, and in 1817 he commanded the Dutch ship of the line Admiraal Evertsen in the Moluccas. Here the Sultan of Tidore comes out in his kora kora, the long Moluccan rowing vessel, while Evertsen fires her salutes. The two ships embody two worlds meeting: the long, low craft with rows of rowers and streaming flags, and the tall European warship wreathed in gun smoke. Two years later, in 1819, Evertsen foundered near Diego Garcia under Ver Huell's command with a cargo of irreplaceable botanical specimens aboard.
The real ship Kora koras were narrow Moluccan rowing vessels about ten metres long, with bamboo outriggers carrying a platform for the rowers, used for trade and war; bigger ones could carry over 100 rowers. Zr.Ms. Admiraal Evertsen was a Dutch ship of the line that foundered near Diego Garcia in 1819 under Ver Huell's command.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Quirijn Maurits Rudolph Ver Huell, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Coastal cargo ship off Kazusa Unnamed
At Sea off Kazusa (Kazusa no kairo), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830 to 1832
Artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP21)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
In a series devoted to a mountain, Hokusai here gives almost the whole sheet to ships. A big coastal trader fills the foreground, her planked hull, deck cargo and great square sail drawn close, with a second ship beside her, and Mount Fuji appears only as a tiny white cone on the horizon beneath her rigging lines. Hokusai treats this working vessel, on the sea route off Kazusa Province, with the same attention he gave the sacred peak. The contrast between the huge hull and the distant mountain is the whole idea of the print.
The vessels Large wooden sailing ships with a single great square sail carried Japan's domestic coastal trade in the Edo period; the dominant type, the bezaisen, had a standard capacity of about 250 seki, with ships of over 1,000 seki appearing by the late Edo period. The Met does not name the type shown.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Sailing boats returning to Yabase on Lake Biwa Unnamed
Returning Sails at Yabase (Yabase no kihan), from the series Eight Views of Ōmi, 1830 to 1838
Artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Where to see it Brooklyn Museum, New York (39.586)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Returning sails is one of the eight classic themes that Japan borrowed from the Chinese Eight Views of Xiaoxiang and set in Ōmi province around Lake Biwa. Yabase was an old harbour on the east side of the lake, near the Tōkaidō, where travellers took the boat as a short cut to Ōtsu. Hiroshige turns the theme into evening light: a line of white sails sliding home across still water under a golden sky and a dark mountain, the boats small, calm and certain of their way.
The vessels The boats of Yabase carried travellers across Lake Biwa as a short cut to Ōtsu; in the early Meiji era steamers appeared, until the railway began its service.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Utagawa Hiroshige, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Two cargo boats in the surf of Tago Bay Unnamed
Tago Bay near Ejiri on the Tōkaidō (Tōkaidō Ejiri Tago no ura ryaku zu), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830 to 1832
Artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP1288)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Two long boats labour through a choppy sea close under the shore, their crews bent at the oars and poles, while the whole upper half of the sheet belongs to Mount Fuji, a vast blue and white cone rising over the villages and trees of Tago Bay. Hokusai sets human effort and the serene mountain in the same frame, the contrast between sacred Fuji and ordinary life that scholars see running through the whole series. The boats are pushed right into the foreground, cut off by the margins, as if the viewer were standing in the water beside them.
The vessels Open wooden coastal boats worked by oar and pole along the Tōkaidō shore; the craft shown are not identified.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Cargo and fishing boats off Tsukudajima Unnamed
Tsukudajima in Musashi Province (Buyō Tsukudajima), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830 to 1832
Artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP23)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Hokusai crowds the waters off Tsukuda Island in Edo with craft: a heavy boat piled high with cargo in the foreground, small boats sculled across the calm bay, and behind the low island a forest of bare masts where larger ships lay at anchor. Mount Fuji sits pale and small on the far shore. It is a portrait of the working harbour of the shogun's capital, every craft busy, with the sacred mountain calm above the traffic.
The vessels The boats are the lighters, ferries and fishing craft of Edo Bay; the masts behind the island belong to coastal cargo ships anchored off the city.
Sources The Met · Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Oshiokuri bune (fast fish barges) Unnamed
Under the Wave off Kanagawa (Kanagawa oki nami ura), also known as The Great Wave, from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830 to 1832
Artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP1847)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Everyone remembers the wave; fewer notice that the picture is really about three boats. They are oshiokuri bune, the fast barges that carried live fish from the Izu and Bōsō peninsulas to the markets of Edo Bay, each with eight rowers holding their oars as the crest curls over them. Mount Fuji, the subject of the series, shrinks to a small blue triangle in the trough. Hokusai, past seventy and in hard times, set human labour between the violence of the sea and the calm of the sacred mountain, and the tension still holds.
“Hokusai cleverly played with perspective to make Japan's grandest mountain appear as a small triangular mound within the hollow of the cresting wave.”
The vessels Oshiokuri bune were slender oared boats, generally 12 to 15 metres long, used in Edo Bay to carry live fish to market at speed. Using the boats as a scale, the wave has been estimated at 10 to 12 metres high.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Cargo boat moored among the reeds at Ushibori Unnamed
Ushibori in Hitachi Province (Jōshū Ushibori), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830 to 1832
Artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP27)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Ushibori, today part of Itako in Ibaraki, was a place of reed beds and open water, and Hokusai shows a quiet moment aboard a big cargo boat moored in the shallows. The long hull runs diagonally across the sheet, its matted deckhouse open to reveal the cabin, and a boatman leans out to empty a pail over the side; the splash startles two white herons into the air. Beyond the reeds rises a snow-white Fuji. It is one of the most domestic images in the series, a boat as a home.
The vessels A long, flat-bottomed working boat with a mat roofed cabin amidships, of the kind used on the inland waters around Ushibori; the boat itself is not identified.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Onmaya ferry boat on the Sumida river Unnamed
Viewing the Sunset over Ryōgoku Bridge from the Onmaya Embankment (Onmayagashi yori Ryōgokubashi sekiyō o miru), from the series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, c. 1830 to 1831
Artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP2997)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
At the end of the day a ferry pushes off from the Onmaya embankment on the Sumida, packed with passengers under wide hats and a parasol, bundles at their feet, while the boatman leans on his long oar. Behind them the great wooden Ryōgoku bridge stretches across the river, and beyond it Fuji shows as a dark silhouette against the evening sky. Hokusai makes the ferry a little floating crowd of Edo life, a small crossing at day's end with the mountain beyond.
The vessels An open ferry boat worked by a single boatman, carrying passengers across the Sumida from the Onmaya embankment in Edo, today Kuramae in Taitō, Tokyo.
Image: Katsushika Hokusai, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Fishing boats off Chōshi Unnamed
Fishing Boats at Chōshi in Shimōsa (Sōshū Chōshi), from the series One Thousand Pictures of the Ocean, also read as Oceans of Wisdom (Chie no umi), c. 1833 to 1834
Artist Katsushika Hokusai (1760 to 1849)
Where to see it Art Institute of Chicago (1983.583)
Medium Colour woodblock print, chūban
Oceans of Wisdom was a small series of ten fishing scenes, one of Hokusai's rarest, and publication stopped abruptly. Its theme is people expressing themselves through labour and working in harmony with the forces of nature, and Chōshi is the print where that harmony is most tested: fishing boats struggle through a stormy sea, echoing the Great Wave made at almost the same moment. Writers who read the Great Wave from right to left point to this print, where the wake shows a boat driving against the current. The whole image is about effort, the crew bent to their work as the water heaps up around them.
The vessels Japanese fishing boats off Chōshi in Shimōsa Province; the series shows fishing of many kinds, from shellfish gathering to whaling.
Sources Art Institute of Chicago · Wikipedia
Image: Katsushika Hokusai, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Shichiri no watashi ferry boats Unnamed
Kuwana: the Seven Ri Ferry at the Port (Kuwana, Shichiri watashiguchi), from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō (Hōeidō edition), 1833 to 1834
Artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP1491)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Travellers on the Tōkaidō could not bridge the three great rivers near Kuwana, because the shogunate forbade bridges that might help an army march on Edo. Instead many took the Shichiri no watashi, a boat ride of about 28 kilometres across Ise Bay, and Hiroshige shows the big ferry boats in front of Kuwana Castle, one with her great white sail half set, while other ships sail away in the background. The ferry is the whole reason this station exists in the picture: the road, for a day, becomes the sea.
The vessels The Shichiri no watashi linked the post stations of Miya and Kuwana across Ise Bay; travellers wary of the sea could take a longer river route by way of Saya.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Boat carrying Nichiren into exile Myth and legend
Nichiren Calming the Waves at Kakuda on his Way to Exile on Sado (Sashū ryūkei Kakuda nami daimoku), from the series Illustrated Abridged Biography of the Founder (Kōso go ichidai ryakuzu), 1833 to 1837
Artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798 to 1861)
Where to see it Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-1956-717)
Medium Colour woodblock print
In September 1271 the monk Nichiren was arrested, and he was later exiled to the island of Sado. Kuniyoshi's series on the life of the founder of the Lotus school gives the crossing its most dramatic moment: Nichiren stands in red robes, rosary in hand, in a crowded boat, calming the high waves, and the sacred words of his chant appear written on the water. Everyone else in the boat cowers; he alone is upright. Kuniyoshi turns a small coastal boat into the stage for a miracle, and the heaving sea into a page of scripture.
The legend An ordinary Japanese coastal boat of the thirteenth century as imagined by an Edo artist; the calming of the waves belongs to Nichiren's legend.
Sources Rijksmuseum · Wikipedia
Image: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Drawing
Three-masted junk at Macau Unnamed
A Chinese Junk, Macau, 1835
Artist George Chinnery (1774 to 1852)
Where to see it Victoria and Albert Museum, London (E.1634-1928)
Medium Pen and ink on paper
Chinnery left India for the China coast in 1825 to escape his creditors and made his home in Macau, where, he claimed, he went out every morning to sketch before breakfast. This sheet comes from an album of ninety-three drawings made from nature in and around Macau. A three-masted junk lies with her sails lowered but pennants still flying at the stern, figures move about on board, and other craft lie near the shore. Among the figures are the Tanka boatwomen who ferried Westerners in their small boats. In his Gurney shorthand he noted that the drawing was correct on 30 September 1835.
“correct September 30th 1835”
The vessels An unnamed three-masted Chinese junk at Macau, drawn with her sails lowered; the V&A records that the sheet comes from an album of ninety-three sketches made in Macau and its vicinity.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, where the original is kept. Photo: Christopher Hilton, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Japan, China and the East · Print
Fishing boats of Tsukudajima Unnamed
Fishing Boats off Tsukudajima from Eitai Bridge (Eitaibashi Tsukudajima ryōsen), from the series Famous Places in the Eastern Capital, c. 1835
Artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP628)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
From the long wooden Eitai bridge, crowded with travellers and a palanquin, Hiroshige looks out over the water to Tsukudajima and its fishing fleet: a cluster of boats at anchor, their bare masts standing in a row like a fence against the pale sky, and small craft sculling across the blue water below. The boats are a quiet presence, the fishing village's livelihood lined up at the edge of the city, while the traffic of the bridge hurries past above them.
The vessels Unnamed fishing boats moored off Tsukuda Island in Edo, as the print's title records.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Qing trading junks arriving at Nagasaki Unnamed
Chinese Ships at Nagasaki, c. 1840
Artist Unidentified Japanese artist; published by Bunsaidō
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012.35)
Medium Woodblock print (nishiki-e); ink and colour on paper; horizontal nagaban
Two Chinese ships approach Nagasaki. On the nearer one the crew hurry to lower a sail as a small boat comes out with a party of returning traders, and an inscription at the upper left names them trading ships of Qing China and records their mission. The long, narrow sheet carries the red seal of its publisher, Bunsaidō. Nagasaki was the only port foreigners were allowed to visit in the Edo period, and prints like this, sold to merchants and to curious Japanese buyers, made the bannered junks among their most exotic subjects.
The vessels Chinese junks from Qing ports traded at Nagasaki throughout the period of seclusion, alongside the Dutch at Dejima.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
Japan, China and the East · Print
Minamoto no Yoshitsune's ship Myth and legend
The Vengeful Ghosts of the Taira Clan Appear at Daimotsu Bay in Settsu Province (Sesshū Daimotsu no ura Heike onryō arawaruru zu), 1840s to 1850s
Artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798 to 1861)
Where to see it British Museum, London (1906,1220,0.1337)
Medium Colour woodblock print, triptych
After the Minamoto destroyed the Taira at Dan-no-ura, the drowned clan's ghosts were said to rise from the sea at Daimotsu Bay. Kuniyoshi spreads the scene across three sheets: Yoshitsune and the warrior monk Benkei are in their warship while the ghosts, led by Taira no Tomomori, rise out of the dark sea towards them. The ship, crowded with armoured men and crested banners, is the last solid thing in a world dissolving into spirits and spray. Here a warship carries the whole weight of a favourite ghost story.
The legend The vessel is legendary, from the story of Yoshitsune's flight by sea after the Genpei war of 1180 to 1185; the kabuki play Yoshitsune Senbon Zakura sets a scene near Daimotsu Bay, where Yoshitsune's party waits for a boat.
Sources British Museum · Wikipedia
Image: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Ferry boats crossing to Arai Unnamed
Arai (Arai, kaijō ichiri han funewatashi no zu), from the series Fifty-three Stations of the Tōkaidō, c. 1842
Artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP568)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
At Arai the Tōkaidō crossed the mouth of Lake Hamana by water, from Maisaka, and the checkpoint here was the only one on the road that stood both on land and on water. The inscription on this print names the crossing: one and a half ri over the sea by boat. Hiroshige fills the sheet with the ferries themselves, a fleet of boats under white sails spread across the blue water, passengers seated amidships, the far shore low and green. For an hour between two post stations, the highway becomes a regatta.
The vessels Ferry boats carried travellers across the lake between Maisaka-juku and Arai-juku; the Arai checkpoint, moved to its present site after the earthquake of 1707, controlled travellers on land and on the water.
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Junks, sampans and a steamer before the Canton factories Unnamed
Canton Waterfront (The Hongs at Canton), 1847 to 1856
Artist Unidentified artist
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (56.212)
Medium Oil on canvas
This view looks across the Pearl River at the row of foreign factories at Canton, the hongs, the principal and only legal site of most Western trade with China from 1757 to 1842, their national flags flying above the colonnades. The river in front tells the story of the port: a big junk with a ribbed mat sail, crowded sampans and cargo boats, and, right in the middle, a small steamer with twin funnels, the new technology gliding past the old. The Met dates the picture to 1847 to 1856, and the waterfront it shows was destroyed by fire in 1856.
The vessels The Thirteen Factories stood on the Pearl River at Canton from about 1684 to 1856 and were destroyed by fire in 1822, in 1841 and finally in 1856; the river before them was crowded with junks and sampans and, by the time of this picture, steamers.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Keying Named ship
The Chinese Junk Keying, Captain Kellett, as she appeared in New York Harbour, July 13th, 1847, 212 days from Canton, 720 tons burthen, 1847
Artist Nathaniel Currier (1813 to 1888)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (63.550.99); another impression at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (PAF7737)
Medium Hand-coloured lithograph
When Keying moored off the Battery in July 1847 she was the first ship from China to visit New York, and some seven thousand people went aboard her every day. Currier, the New York lithographer, published this portrait with the facts of the voyage in the title, as if the numbers themselves were part of the marvel. The junk sits high and strange, her painted hull and tall masts unlike anything built on the Hudson. Western artists often exaggerated her unfamiliar lines, but the Currier print, as Keying's historians note, does not, and that makes it one of the more trustworthy records of her.
The real ship Keying was bought secretly in Hong Kong in August 1846 by British businessmen, against a Chinese law forbidding the sale of junks to foreigners, and sailed in December 1846 under Captain Charles Kellett with a British and Cantonese crew. She reached New York in July 1847, Boston that November and the Thames in March 1848, where Queen Victoria visited her; she was later broken up on the Mersey in 1853.
Sources The Met · Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Nathaniel Currier, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Keying Named ship
The Chinese Junk Keying, Captain Kellet. The first junk that ever rounded the Cape of Good Hope, or appeared in British waters. As she appeared off Gravesend 28th March, 1848, 477 days from Canton, 1848 (published 20 May 1848)
Artist Rock Brothers and Payne (publishers)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (PAF7738)
Medium Hand-coloured aquatint
Keying's arrival in the Thames in March 1848 was treated as an event, and the long title of this London print reads like the inscription on the medal struck in her honour: the first junk ever to round the Cape of Good Hope or appear in British waters. The Illustrated London News praised her sea-keeping as equal to British ships, and at Blackwall crowds paid a shilling to step, as The Times put it, from the Thames into the vicinity of Canton. The print catches her off Gravesend at the end of a voyage of 477 days from Canton, an unmistakably Chinese silhouette in the grey water of the Thames estuary.
“There is not a more interesting Exhibition in the vicinity of London than the Chinese Junk”
The real ship Built of teak in the Fuzhou style and bought in Hong Kong in 1846, Keying sailed by the Cape and St Helena to New York, Boston and London, where she lay on exhibition at Blackwall. Sold in 1853 and towed to the Mersey, she was dismantled there, and by 1855 her remains lay rotting at Tranmere.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Rock Brothers and Payne, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Minamoto no Tametomo's storm-wrecked ship Myth and legend
Retired Emperor Sanuki Sends Allies to Rescue Tametomo (Sanuki no in kenzoku o shite Tametomo o sukuu zu), 1848 to 1852
Artist Utagawa Kuniyoshi (1798 to 1861)
Where to see it British Museum, London (1906,1220,0.1339)
Medium Colour woodblock print, triptych
Kuniyoshi took this scene from Kyokutei Bakin's novel of Tametomo and from Hokusai's illustrations to it. The archer Tametomo and his party, fleeing by sea, are overcome by a storm: his wife gives herself to the waves to calm them, the retainer Kihei rescues the hero's child on the back of a huge shark, and tengu, followers of the dead Emperor Sutoku, stop Tametomo from taking his own life. The storm-struck ship is the stage for all of it as the supernatural pours in. The British Museum sees it as an example of Kuniyoshi's heroic style.
The legend A fictional vessel from Bakin's novel Chinsetsu Yumiharizuki about Minamoto no Tametomo (1139 to 1170), the samurai of the Hōgen Rebellion; the scene is legend, not record.
Sources British Museum · Wikipedia
Image: Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Chinese trading junk Unnamed
Chinese Junks, 1850
Artist Attributed to George Chinnery (1774 to 1852)
Where to see it National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (BHC1180)
Medium Oil on canvas on board
The National Maritime Museum describes this as a painting of a Chinese junk off a mountainous coast shown for its own sake, with no reference to any historic event, a subject that fascinated European audiences in the nineteenth century. The attribution to Chinnery is not confirmed by documents, but the English painter spent most of his life in Asia and was based at Macau from 1825 until his death in 1852, making regular visits to Canton until 1832. The painted junk, sails full of wind, carries all of that long residence on the China coast in one proud hull.
“This painting of a Chinese junk off a mountainous coastline displays the vessel for its own sake without any reference to an historic event.”
The vessels Junks with battened lug sails, high sterns and hanging rudders carried the coastal and overseas trade of southern China; the ship shown is unidentified.
Sources Royal Museums Greenwich · Wikipedia
Image: Attributed to George Chinnery, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Western paddle steamer off Uraga Unnamed
Complete Picture of a Steamship off Kanazawa (Jōkisen zenzu), 19th century
Artist Utagawa Sadahide (1807 to c. 1879)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007.49.299a to c)
Medium Triptych of woodblock prints; ink and colour on paper
Sadahide was best known for his Yokohama prints of the 1860s, a time when he was a best-selling artist and curiosity about foreigners and their machines was at its height. Across three sheets he lays out a steamship in full profile, paddle wheel churning, two funnels pouring smoke, masts rigged fore and aft and passengers along the rail, with Mount Fuji on the horizon and the heading Seascape off Uraga, the anchorage where Perry's squadron had arrived in 1853. It is part technical diagram and part wonder, the new kind of ship explained to people who had watched it come.
The vessels The vessel is a generic Western side-wheel steamer of the kind that visited Japanese waters after the opening of the ports; no name is given.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Dutch ships at Nagasaki Unnamed
Dutch Ships (Orandasen), c. 1850
Artist Anonymous Japanese print designer
Where to see it Library of Congress, Washington (LCCN 2002700129)
Medium Colour woodcut on hōsho paper
Nagasaki was the only port foreigners were allowed to visit between 1641 and 1859, and prints made there, mostly by anonymous designers, showed the Dutch and Chinese who came and the ships that brought them. They were sold to merchants who travelled to Japan on business and to Japanese buyers curious about foreigners they could not meet themselves. This sheet shows two Dutch ships under the Dutch flag: one under full sail in the distance, the other seen from astern with her guns firing in round white clouds of smoke. It is the foreign ship as the port of Nagasaki saw it.
The vessels Nagasaki was the only Japanese port open to foreigners between 1641 and 1859, and Dutch ships called there to trade; the print shows two three-masted Dutch ships.
Sources Library of Congress · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Japan, China and the East · Print
First cutter of USS Mississippi Named ship
Passing the Rubicon: Lieutenant S. Bent in the Mississippi's First Cutter Forcing his Way through a Fleet of Japanese Boats while Surveying the Bay of Yedo, July 11th, 1853
Artist After Wilhelm Heine (1827 to 1885)
Where to see it Brown University Library, Providence
Medium Colour lithograph with hand-colouring on paper
Wilhelm Heine was chosen from scores of applicants as official artist to Perry's expedition and served aboard the flagship USS Mississippi, and his sketches became the pictorial record of the opening of Japan. Here the drama is small and precise: a single American cutter, sent to survey the bay of Edo on 11 July 1853, pushes through a crowd of Japanese guard boats. The title borrows Caesar's point of no return. It is a picture about trespass as much as courage, a ship's boat crossing a line that Japan had held for two centuries.
The real ship USS Mississippi, a side-wheel steam frigate commissioned in 1841 and built under Perry's own supervision, was one of the four ships of his squadron at Uraga in July 1853; her first cutter was the ship's boat sent to survey the bay.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: After Wilhelm Heine, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
USS Powhatan and the ships of Perry's squadron Named ship
The Mission of Commodore Perry to Japan in 1854 (the Black Ship Scroll), 1854 to 1858
Artist Attributed to Hibata Ōsuke and Takagawa Bunsen (preparatory sketches); preface calligraphy by Ōnuma Chinzan
Where to see it British Museum, London (2013,3002.1)
Medium Handscroll; ink, colour, gold and silver pigment on paper
This fifteen-metre scroll is, in the British Museum's words, one of the most complete and finely executed pictorial records from the Japanese side of Perry's second visit in 1854. Its sketches were made by eyewitnesses: troop formations, the Americans landing at Yokohama in 27 barges, a banquet, a funeral procession, sumo wrestlers, and nine detailed studies of the American ships with Japanese boats around them. Seen through Japanese eyes the kurofune are machines to be measured and understood, and the careful drawing is itself a kind of answer to the threat they carried.
“one of the most complete and finely executed pictorial records from the Japanese side”
The real ship Perry's squadron of July 1853 was Susquehanna, Mississippi, Plymouth and Saratoga. USS Powhatan, a side-wheel steam frigate, entered Edo Bay with the squadron on 14 February 1854 and remained until the Convention of Kanagawa was signed on 31 March 1854; a banquet for the Japanese negotiators was held aboard her.
Sources British Museum · Wikipedia
Image: Attributed to Hibata Ōsuke and Takagawa Bunsen, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Perry's squadron and landing boats at Kurihama Named ship
First Landing of Americans in Japan, 1855
Artist Eliphalet M. Brown Jr. after Wilhelm Heine (1827 to 1885)
Where to see it National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington (NPG.78.83)
Medium Colour lithograph with hand-colouring on paper
Perry had ignored Japanese requests that he move on to Nagasaki and threatened to attack Edo, and it was finally agreed that he could land nearby at Kurihama to deliver his letter. Heine, the official artist of the expedition, recorded the scene. Ship's boats lie along the beach under their flags, American sailors and marines stand in long ranks on the sand, and Japanese officials and troops with banners and horses look on. Far out in the bay lie the ships themselves. They sit small on the horizon, yet everything on the shore happens because of them.
The real ship Perry's squadron of July 1853 was four US Navy warships, Mississippi, Plymouth, Saratoga and Susquehanna. Japanese had long called Western vessels kurofune, black ships, and the name stuck to Perry's squadron, whose coal-fired engines belched black smoke.
Sources Smithsonian · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Eliphalet M. Brown Jr. after Wilhelm Heine, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Log raft on the Sumida river Unnamed
Sudden Shower over Shin-Ōhashi Bridge and Atake (Ōhashi Atake no yūdachi), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1857
Artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP643)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Published in the ninth month of 1857, this is one of Hiroshige's best-known prints. People scurry across the wooden Shin Ōhashi bridge under hats and straw capes while a lone boatman punts a log raft towards the Fukagawa timber yards, steady at his pole in the downpour. Hiroshige called it white rain, cut as fine dark lines in two directions. The far bank is Atake, named after the government ship Atakemaru once moored there. Van Gogh copied the print in oils, and the raftsman crossed to Europe with it.
The vessels A log raft punted by one man towards the timber yards of Fukagawa on the Sumida. The district of Atake on the far bank took its name from the Atakemaru, a government ship formerly moored there.
Image: Utagawa Hiroshige, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Pleasure boats (yakatabune) on the Sumida Unnamed
Fireworks at Ryōgoku Bridge (Ryōgoku hanabi), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1858
Artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP642)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Hiroshige paints a fireworks night on the Sumida from above: a rocket climbs in a thin red line and bursts into sparks over a dark sky, the long Ryōgoku bridge crosses the river, and the water below is dotted with boats, one pleasure barge glowing with lanterns among dozens of small craft. The boats are the audience. Yakatabune, the roofed pleasure boats of Edo with tatami mats and low tables inside, were basically for entertaining guests, and this print is their portrait on a summer night.
The vessels Yakatabune, privately owned pleasure boats whose name means home-style boat, have been used since the Heian period; the shoguns' own were lavishly decorated, and they still ply Tokyo's rivers with red lanterns along the cabin.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Haneda ferry boat Unnamed
Haneda Ferry and Benten Shrine (Haneda no watashi Benten no yashiro), from the series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, 1858
Artist Utagawa Hiroshige (1797 to 1858)
Where to see it Los Angeles County Museum of Art (AC1995.62.1)
Medium Colour woodblock print
Hiroshige puts us in the ferry itself. All we see of the boatman are his bare, muscular legs and arms, gripping the long sculling oar, its rope cutting down through the frame, and between his limbs opens the view: the shore, the lantern and shrine of Benten at Haneda, reeds, and a few sails on a pink horizon. It is one of the boldest compositions of the late series, number 72, and the ferry is not described at all, only felt, through the effort of the man driving it. The viewer becomes the passenger.
The vessels The Haneda ferry was a small boat driven by a single sculling oar; the print shows it from the passenger's place, looking towards the Benten shrine.
Sources collections.lacma.org · Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons
Image: Utagawa Hiroshige, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
Chinese junk (tōsen) at Nagasaki Unnamed
Dutch and Chinese Ships in the Harbor at Nagasaki in Hizen Province (Hizen Nagasaki tōsen no tsu), from the series One Hundred Views of Famous Places in the Provinces, 1859 (3rd month)
Artist Utagawa Hiroshige II (1826 to 1869)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007.49.136)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
From 1641 until 1859 Nagasaki was the only port in Japan that foreigners were allowed to visit, and the Chinese who came there were as much a part of its life as the Dutch. Hiroshige II, the pupil who inherited his master's name after his death in 1858, fills the tall sheet with the stern of a Chinese junk: painted panels, a great bird on the transom, red banners streaming from the masts. The small Japanese boat on the water beside her gives the scale. Published in the third month of 1859, it shows the old licensed trade in all its colour.
The vessels Chinese trading junks sailed to Nagasaki throughout the period when it was the only port open to foreigners, between 1641 and 1859; the junk shown is not named.
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Kanrin Maru Named ship
The Kanrin Maru Sailing through a Gale (Kanrin Maru reppū kōkō no zu), c. 1860
Artist Suzufuji Yūjirō (1826 to 1868)
Source Reproduced in Man'en gannen kenbei shisetsu zuroku, National Diet Library, Tokyo
In February 1860 the Kanrin Maru left Uraga for San Francisco, carrying Katsu Kaishū, Fukuzawa Yukichi, John Manjirō and ninety-six Japanese sailors, with the American officer John M. Brooke, as part of Japan's first embassy to the United States. Suzufuji Yūjirō was one of her officers, appointed to handle the ship, and he painted her as he had lived her: heeled hard over in heavy seas, rigging straining, the rising sun flag at her stern. It is a sailor's picture of a ship in trouble, and a record of Japan showing it could master Western seamanship.
The real ship Kanrin Maru was built by Fop Smit at Kinderdijk in the Netherlands and delivered in 1857, Japan's first sail and screw-driven steam corvette. After the 1860 voyage to San Francisco she went to the Bonin Islands in 1861, was captured by imperial forces in Shimizu harbour in the Boshin War, and was lost off Cape Saraki in Hokkaido in 1871.
Sources Wikipedia · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia (JA)
Image: Suzufuji Yūjirō, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Painting
Kanrin Maru and an American whaler Named ship
The Kanrin Maru Meets an American Whaling Ship, from Ogasawara Island Scenery (Ogasawara-tō shinkei zu), c. 1861
Artist Miyamoto Gendō (born 1824)
Where to see it National Diet Library, Tokyo
Medium Painting in an illustrated book
In January 1861 the Kanrin Maru was sent to the Bonin Islands, known in Japan as Ogasawara, as flagship of the shogunate's mission to claim them, at a time when Britain had claimed the islands and the United States had considered them for a naval base. These pictures of Ogasawara Island scenery record the voyage. Its inscription notes that on the tenth day of the third month, on the way home, the Kanrin Maru met an American whaling ship. Gendō paints both under full sail on a blue sea, the Japanese flag at one stern and the Stars and Stripes at the other, with a whaleboat rowing between them.
The real ship Kanrin Maru, a screw steam corvette built at Kinderdijk in the Netherlands and delivered in 1857, served as flagship of the 1861 Bonin Islands expedition and met an American whaler on the voyage home.
Sources dl.ndl.go.jp · Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Japan, China and the East · Print
American merchant ship loading at Yokohama Unnamed
Yokohama Trade: Westerners Loading Cargo (Yokohama kōeki seiyōjin nimotsu unsō no zu), 1861
Artist Utagawa Sadahide (1807 to c. 1879)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007.49.127a to e)
Medium Pentaptych of woodblock prints; ink and colour on paper
Yokohama opened to foreign trade in 1859, and within two years Sadahide was showing the public exactly what went on there. This five-sheet print climbs aboard an American merchant ship flying the Stars and Stripes: sailors swarm up the ratlines, bales and crates are carried up a gangway, and Western men and women watch from the deck. Utagawa artists produced more than 800 Yokohama prints for a public curious about these strangers, and this is one of the most crowded and alive, the ship as a whole foreign world in miniature.
The vessels The ship is an unidentified American merchant vessel of the early Yokohama trade that followed the opening of the port in 1859.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Chinese junk Unnamed
Chinese Junk (Tōsen no zu), 1862
Artist Utagawa Yoshitora (active c. 1850 to 1880)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007.49.209)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
Yoshitora, the oldest pupil of Kuniyoshi, produced many prints of foreigners in the years after Japan was opened to trade, though he may never have seen the scenes he drew. Here a single Chinese junk fills a tall sheet: battened mat sails, a dragon pennant, red and white banners, a painted hull, with a long text above and a roundel portrait of a Chinese official in the corner. Part ship portrait and part encyclopedia page, it answers the curiosity of a public just beginning to see the wider world.
The vessels A Chinese trading junk; by 1862 Japanese printmakers were depicting such ships alongside Western vessels for a public eager for foreign subjects.
Image: Utagawa Yoshitora, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Drawing
Kaiyō Maru, Kaiten Maru, Banryū Maru, Chiyodagata, Shinsoku Maru, Mikaho Maru, Kanrin Maru and Chōgei Maru Named ship
Eight Tokugawa Warships Setting Sail off Shinagawa, Autumn 1868 (Boshin chūshū Tokugawa gunkan hasseki Shinagawa oki kaihan no zu), 1868
Artist Kosugi Masanoshin (1843 to 1909)
Medium Drawing
In the autumn of 1868, as the shogunate collapsed, Enomoto Takeaki led its last fleet of eight ships out of Edo, setting sail from Shinagawa for the north. Kosugi Masanoshin, chief engineer of the flagship Kaiyō Maru, drew the fleet as it left: tall-masted steamers and sailing ships side by side, smoke rising from their funnels. Kanrin Maru appears among them as a barque with no funnel. On the way north the fleet met a typhoon, and Kanrin Maru, forced into Shimizu harbour, was captured there by imperial forces. It is a portrait of a navy setting out on its last voyage, drawn by a man who sailed with it.
The real ship Kanrin Maru, Japan's first screw steam corvette, was built at Kinderdijk in the Netherlands and delivered in 1857. She was one of Enomoto's eight ships; after the typhoon she took refuge at Shimizu, where imperial forces bombarded and boarded her despite a white flag and killed her crew.
Sources Wikimedia Commons · Wikipedia
Image: Kosugi Masanoshin, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Japan, China and the East · Print
American full-rigged ship off Arai Unnamed
An American Sailing Ship off Arai, from the series Pictures and Poems of the Fifty-three Stations (Shoga gojūsan eki), 1872
Artist Utagawa Yoshimori (1830 to 1884)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2007.49.243)
Medium Woodblock print; ink and colour on paper
In the 1830s Hiroshige had shown the station of Arai on the Tōkaidō as a crossing of Lake Hamana, a daimyō and his baggage carried over by boat. In October 1872, four years into the Meiji era, Yoshimori drew Arai for a new series of pictures and poems of the fifty-three stations and put an American ship there instead: a full-rigged merchantman driving through the open sea under a cloud of sail, the Stars and Stripes at her stern and masthead. A poem in Chinese style above the picture ends with the Pacific. The old road now looked out to the ocean and to the ships that came across it.
The vessels An unidentified American square-rigged sailing ship of the kind that traded with Japan after the ports were opened; the print shows her with three masts and all plain sail set.
Japan, China and the East · Print
Paddle steamer off Miho Unnamed
Fuji with Boat at Miho in Sunshū (Shizuoka), 1878
Artist Kobayashi Kiyochika (1847 to 1915)
Where to see it The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (JP3336)
Medium Triptych of woodblock prints; ink and colour on paper
Kiyochika recorded the rapid modernisation of Meiji Japan and brought to the woodblock print a sense of light and shade inspired by Western art. In this triptych of October 1878 a big paddle steamer ploughs through heavy, white-crested seas off Miho, the Japanese flag at her stern, while a full moon hangs over a distant sailing ship on one side and a rose tinted Fuji rises on the other. The old sacred mountain and the new steamship share the same stormy sea.
The vessels An unnamed Western-style paddle steamer with auxiliary masts flying the Japanese flag, of the kind that carried the new shipping of early Meiji Japan.
No free image of this work exists. The photograph shows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the original is kept. Photo: Arad, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. See the work at the museum
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