The colorful woodblock print of a Chinese trading ship that graces the cover of this issue of HJAS is an example of a popular form of mass-produced images known as Nagasaki prints (Nagasaki hanga 長崎版画 or Nagasaki-e 長崎絵). This print came to the Harvard Art Museums collection as part of a bequest by William Slattery Lieberman (1924–2005). Lieberman took graduate courses in museum studies at Harvard University before embarking on an esteemed career at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City, where he ultimately became the curator of the Department of Painting and Sculpture while concurrently serving as a consultant for modern art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met). He is celebrated for enhancing MoMA’s holdings of twentieth-century art, most notably major works by Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris from Gertrude Stein’s collection, as well as works by Joan Miró and Henri Matisse. Although he was less well-known for his work on Asian art, Lieberman helped to curate an exhibition of contemporary Japanese art at MoMA in 1966, and it seems he also had a personal affinity for Nagasaki prints and ukiyo-e 浮世絵 woodblock prints and painting, since many such works from his collection can be found today among the holdings of The Met and the Harvard Art Museums.

Nagasaki prints feature scenes of exotic foreigners and animals, as well as Chinese and Dutch ships in and around Nagasaki harbor. These prints, which were produced during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, were sold as souvenirs to merchants, travelers, and collectors. The glimpses of the outside world depicted on these prints were particularly valued at this time, since this was a period when the Tokugawa military government (bakufu 幕府) maintained a policy of kaikin 海禁 (maritime restrictions), which came to be known as sakoku 鎖國 (seclusion of the country), aimed at restricting foreign trade and regulating Japan’s contact with foreigners.¹ From the mid-seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, Nagasaki was a Japanese port that was open to officially sanctioned but limited foreign trade, which at different times included, among other things, silver, copper, silks, sugar, and ginger. Dutch traders were sequestered on Dejima 出島, an artificial island in Nagasaki harbor, and Chinese traders were confined to the harsh conditions of the Tōkan 唐館 or Tōjin yashiki 唐人屋敷 (Chinese compound), a walled residential settlement that also included many Chinese temples and market stalls.² Despite attempts to limit contact between the Japanese and outsiders, there is evidence suggesting that in addition to being the center for trade in foreign goods, Nagasaki also became a conduit for the exchange of ideas.³ With the opening of Japan in the mid-nineteenth century, however, Yokohama displaced Nagasaki as the main hub for both foreign trade and the production of such woodblock prints.

The Harvard print on the cover is undated but it bears a seal of the Masunaga 益永 publishing house, which, though not as prominent a publisher of Nagasaki prints as Hariya 針屋 or Bunkindō 文錦堂, was active from the late eighteenth century on.⁴ The Harvard Nagasaki print most likely dates to the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century (the Harvard catalogue dates it to “circa 1840”). The image was, therefore, produced about six hundred years after the types of Chinese ships discussed in Eunmi Go’s article in this issue, “Ship Requisition, Changes in Trade, and the Rise of Piracy During the Southern Song.” Still, it might provide some sense of the types of seagoing merchant ships—as well as those used by smugglers and pirates (Ch. haizei 海賊, J. kaizoku; or Ch. wokou 倭寇, J. wakō)—that for centuries plied the waters between China, Korea, and Japan, an area that some scholars refer to as the “East Asian Mediterranean.”⁵ We learn from Go’s article that as early as the twelfth century, Chinese merchants sailing on junks were establishing overseas bases in Japan and Korea, where they stayed for long periods of time while awaiting optimal winds for their return journeys. The East China Sea region, and Nagasaki in particular, was itself connected to a wider network of maritime trade routes that extended to other parts of Asia, including Vietnam, Siam (Thailand), the Philippines, Singapore, Borneo, Sumatra, and Java, making it a prime historical stage for such merchants and other ship-operators who, as Go’s article shows, were often driven to pursue illicit means of survival and profiteering by forces outside of their control—presumably on vessels similar to the boat featured here.⁶

The cover image is catalogued as a “Chinese Junk,” reflecting a notable example of the small category of words in the English language that refer exclusively to items from East Asian material culture. “Junk” is derived from the Portuguese junco, which is itself based on the Malay word jong. The term originally referred to large Javanese trading ships (djong), but in the seventeenth century, it came to be applied to Chinese ships (chuan 船).⁷ Our image bears the title “Tōsen zu” 唐船圖 (Image of a Chinese ship). The term “Tō” 唐 refers to the Tang dynasty (618–907), which during the Edo period (1603–1868) was the common way to refer to China.⁸ The accompanying text on the upper portion of the image gives the distances in ri 里 (a unit equivalent to 2.44 miles) from Nagasaki to destinations in China, including Chongming 崇明 (221 ri), Shanghai 上海 (222 ri), Zhapu 乍浦 (260 ri), Putuo shan 普陀山 (280 ri), Ningbo 寧波 (300 ri), Nanjing 南京 (340 ri), Quanzhou 泉州 (423 ri), Dengzhou 登州 (493 ri), Fuzhou 福州 (550 ri), Xiamen 廈門 (600 ri), Beijing 北京 (600 ri), Zhangzhou 漳州 (620 ri), Taiwan 臺灣 (640 ri), Guangdong 廣東 (900 ri), Guangnan 廣南 (1,015 ri), and Dongjing 東京 (1,600 ri). The middle portion of the image below the list of place names contains a textual description of the ship: length (nagasa 長 サ), 25 ken 間 (roughly 165 feet); width (haba 幅), 7 ken (45 feet); main mast (ōbashira 大柱), 25 ken; and it also notes that it carries “a crew of more than one hundred people” (norikumi hyakunin amari 乘組百人余).⁹

There was no standardized junk, since they came in different sizes, but they did share some characteristics, such as their large central rudder, multiple masts, and watertight bulkheads.¹⁰ One noteworthy feature of Chinese junks (which distinguishes them from Dutch and other ships) is also the prominent eyes painted on each side of the bow, which allowed the ship to “see” and ensured a safe journey. The origin of the practice of painting eyes on ships is not entirely clear but seems to go back to the story of a ship that encountered a dangerous storm and lost its way. The crew prayed to the god of the sea (usually identified as Mazu 媽祖, whose image is also commonly found on altars set up on boats), who assisted them by adding eyes that allowed them to complete their journey safely. An early twentieth-century description by Ivon A. Donnelly states that “the ‘eye’ painted on the bows of so many junks is a superstition generally attributed to the Chinese, the theory being that to a Chinaman a junk is a fish, which without any eye could not see how to go on its way.”¹¹ The practice of painting eyes on boats to assist with difficult navigation, secure good luck, and ward off evil was also found in ancient Egypt and Greece. It was adopted by Arab seafarers and is still a practice that is found in China, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam. When one reads Eunmi Go’s article in this issue about the challenges and dangers of maritime trade—fraught as it was with fears about having boats requisitioned for sea defense by the government, plundered by pirates, or destroyed by storms—one can well appreciate why these seafarers would avail themselves of any means possible to protect themselves and their ships. 

1. On the neologism “sakoku,” see Ronald P. Toby, “Reopening the Question of Sakoku: Diplomacy in the Legitimation of the Tokugawa Bakufu,” Journal of Japanese Studies 3.2 (1977): 323–63, see esp. pp. 323–24n1.
2. For a rich description of Nagasaki from about a century prior to the date of this print, see Engelbert Kaempfer, Kaempfer’s Japan: Tokugawa Culture Observed, ed., trans., and annot. Beatrice Bodart-Bailey (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), pp. 137–235; details about Dutch traders are found on pp. 187–223, and about Chinese trade ships and merchants on pp. 224–28. On the Chinese settlement, see Ri Kenshō [Li Xianzhang] 李献璋, Nagasaki Tōjin no kenkyū 長崎唐人の研究 (Sasebo, Jpn.: Shinwa ginkō, 1991), pp. 179–259.
3. Matsuura Akira, “Sino-Japanese Interaction via Chinese Junks in the Edo Period,” Journal of Cultural Interaction in East Asia 1.1 (2010): 57–70, esp. pp. 65–68.
4. For an identical print of the Harvard Chinese ship with the same seal, see N. H. N. Mody, A Collection of Nagasaki Colour Prints and Paintings: Showing the Influence of Chinese and European Art on that of Japan (Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1969), plate 96. Nearly identical prints, published by other printing houses, can be found in other collections, including those in the Hong Kong Maritime Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.
5. Angela Schottenhammer, ed., The East Asian Mediterranean: Maritime Crossroads of Culture, Commerce, and Human Migration (Wiesbaden, Deu.: Otto Harrassowitz, 2008); and Angela Schottenhammer, “The East Asian ‘Mediterranean’: A Medium of Flourishing Exchange Relations and Interaction in the East Asian World,” in The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography, ed. Peter N. Miller (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), pp. 109–44. On smugglers and pirates, see Robert J. Antony, Like Froth Floating on the Sea: The World of Pirates and Seafarers in Late Imperial South China (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 2003); and Robert J. Antony, ed., Elusive Pirates, Pervasive Smugglers: Violence and Clandestine Trade in the Greater China Seas (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010).
6. Richard von Glahn, “The Maritime Trading World of East Asia from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries,” in Picturing Commerce in and from the East Asian Maritime Circuits, 1550–1800, ed. Tamara H. Bentley (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 55–82.
7. Pierre-Yves Manguin, “The Vanishing Jong: Insular Southeast Asian Fleets in Trade and War (Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries),” in Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era, ed. Anthony Reid (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), pp. 197–213.
8. On the term Tōsen 唐船, see Matsuura, “Sino-Japanese Interaction,” p. 57; and Matsuura Akira 松浦章, Edo jidai Tōsen ni yoru Nitchū bunka kōryū 江戸時代唐船による日中文化交流 (Kyoto: Shibunkaku shuppan, 2007).
9. For a discussion of the various measurements of Chinese ships, see Osamu Oba, “Scroll Paintings of Chinese Junks which Sailed to Nagasaki in the 18th Century and Their Equipment,” The Mariner’s Mirror 60.4 (1974): 351–62.
10. On the evolution of Chinese boat design, see Joseph Needham with Wang Ling and Lu Gwei-Djen, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 4, bk. 3: Civil Engineering and Nautics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), pp. 379–554.
11. Ivon A. Donnelly, Junks and Other Native Craft (Shanghai: Kelly and Walsh, 1924), p. 8.