Chinese Men

Yokohama Prints
The prints depicting foreigners in the 1860s and 1870s at the newly opened port of Yokohama were called Yokohama prints, despite being published in Edo (Tokyo). To help satisfy public curiosity, Edo print publishers sent some artists to Yokohama to sketch the foreigners and quickly and inexpensively published the depictions in woodblock prints. The Japanese artists’ struggle to depict the unfamiliar foreigners led to odd pictorial conventions, which lent the Yokohama prints a warmth and humorous charm.
Among the countries represented by the figures in the prints in this gallery are China and the five nations which signed trade treaties with Japan in 1858: the United States, England, France, Holland, and Russia. Except for the Chinese men, it is difficult to determine the nationality of each of these figures. The artists helped the nineteenth century Japanese identify the foreigners by writing their nationalities on the prints. Hundreds of Yokohama prints were published during a short period of time; however, their popularity quickly waned by the early 1880s., In this print the persons, identified as “Qing Dynasty Men,” stand before a partially unrolled handscroll that bears a list of foreign words. The vocabulary lesson gives basic words referring to people, such as man, woman, father, mother, young, and old. These words appear in the same format as Foreign Words: Dutch by Utagawa Yoshiiku (1833–1904), displayed nearby, with the Japanese in the upper portion and the Dutch equivalent given phonetically in a Japanese script below. Even though the subject of the print is Chinese, Dutch words were listed here because Dutch was the common language of the treaty ports at that time.