The Buddhas in the West Material Archive exhibit, “Collecting Asia: Popular Art of the Victorian Trade Card,” is featured at the San Diego Central Library, Special Collections, from February 10 through June 20, 2026.
Welcome to the Companion Guide
This accompanying digital companion guide offers a high-resolution Deep Zoom Image Gallery and an informative De-Coding Guide for six key trade cards on display – one for each of the six main visual themes: Performing Asia, The Japan Craze, Chinese Exclusion, The Mikado Craze, Buddhist Vogue, and Globetrotting Asia.
The exhibition explores the “color revolution” of late nineteenth-century lithographic printing through early advertising trade cards. The exhibit focuses on depictions of Asia and Asian American life across fifty trade cards to see how a visual language around race, religion, and the “exotic Orient” was created during the first major wave of Asian immigration to the United States.
In the late nineteenth century, as black-and-white engravings dominated the pages of books, magazines, and newspapers, a “color revolution” in lithography began to reshape the American imagination. Vibrant broadside advertising, rich package labeling, and colorful trade cards all became mass produced canvasses to express commercial and cultural ideas.
This technological shift coincided with a transformative era in American society: the first major wave of Asian immigration. Beginning with Chinese workers in the mines, forests, and railroads of the West, and followed by Japanese, Korean, and Filipino immigrants, these new arrivals fundamentally altered the nation’s demographic landscape.
This exhibit explores the confluence of new print technology and shifting racial and religious demographics. Asia has long occupied an ambiguous space in European and American minds – simultaneously perceived as a land of allure and a source of danger.
This exhibit examines these tensions through trade cards, the vibrant, mass-produced advertising cards of the Victorian era. These cards were inserted into packaged goods or distributed over the counter at dry goods stores. Prized for their visual appeal, trade cards also became popular collectibles among Victorian scrapbookers – many of them children – who were inevitably shaped by the highly stereotyped imagery the cards so often conveyed.
To collect these trade cards was to curate a fantasy of Asian identity – one that often replaced the reality of Asian and Asian American lives.
To Consider:
- How have advances in print and digital technology helped or hindered our understanding of a multi-cultural America?
- How has our visual language for “the Other” changed in 130 years?
Deep Zoom Image Gallery & De-Coding Guide
Key Card 1: Performing Asia (1860s)
Sapanule is an example of a late nineteenth century patent medicine that overstated its claims. Glycerin, the only named ingredient, is an effective moisturizing agent for many skin conditions, but claims to treat diptheria and rheumatism – as emblazoned on the front of this trade card – are unfounded.
As was common at the time, the imagery on trade cards had little relationship to product being marketed. Sapanule issued a set of five cards each depicting imagery associated with Japan, printed by lithographer L. Sunderland in Providence, RI.
The images were not original, however, but copies from a series of engravings that first appeared in Swiss diplomat Aimé Humbert’s writings on Japan published in the late 1860’s. Several of those illustrations focused on Japanese street performers, acrobats, and jugglers and were copied by many subsequent publications, including Edward Greey’s 1882 book, Americans in Japan, also seen in the exhibit.
To Consider:
- Two Sapanule trade cards on display were copied from the illustration seen in Greey’s Americans in Japan. Can you spot both of them?
- How does the repetition of imagery across different media enliven specific kinds of stereotypes?
Key Card 2: Japan Craze (1870s)
The Boston-based printer John H. Bufford & Sons was among many lithographers who produced stock trade cards designed to be overprinted with the names and addresses of local businesses. In one three-card series, Bufford depicted Japan as a serene fantasy land; its gold-ink border further “packaged” the country as an luxury object.
A Buddhist pagoda, seen in the top left, was a centuries-old visual standard for depicting East Asian landscapes. The pagoda here was first seen in the illustrated works on Japan by Aimé Humbert published in the late 1860’s and represents a building at Hachiman’s Shrine in Kamakura.
The elegant Japanese egret was also emerging as a symbol of Japan in Western media. During the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, Japanese representatives built a Japanese “bazaar” and displayed large bronze sculptures, including egrets, as seen in the stereoviews accompanying this display. Note these birds also appear as decorations on the die-cut trade cards on display in the shape of hand fans.
These elegant birds became popular decorative motifs in American Japonisme, sometimes called the “Japan Craze,” which reflected the growing interest in a Japanese aesthetic that influenced fine art, architecture, and the decorative arts. This helped cast Japan as a land of exotic curios and emboldened mass consumption of everyday objects, laying groundwork for early modern consumerism.
To Consider:
- What challenges to cross-cultural understanding may arise if a foreign culture is mainly interpreted through the commercial objects it produces?
Key Card 3: Chinese Exclusion (1882)
Many trade cards promoted products for domestic home use, such as sewing machines, stove polish, and quick-rising flour. Washing and laundry soap also emerged as popular commercial products. This Lavine Soap card depicts Chinese men dancing around a larger-than-life soap box, suggesting childlike joy over the new laundry product. While seemingly playful, this lithographic illustration also reveals economic and racial tensions of the era.
As part of the first major wave of Asian immigration to the United States, Chinese laborers faced racial discrimination, forcing many into self-employed work, such as running laundries, groceries, and restaurants. By the 1870s, American politicians and labor leaders started blaming Chinese “coolie labor” for depressed wage levels, leading to federal legislation that barred all Chinese immigration in 1882.
While the images on many trade cards were disconnected to the product being advertised, the connection between laundry soap and Chinese laundrymen would have been readily apparent to a Victorian-era American audience.
Other trade cards, such as those advertising waterproof shirt collars and cuffs as seen in this display, present Chinese labor as replaceable by these new products, tacitly justifying the popular anti-Chinese slogan, “the Chinese must go.” It is believed the originator of this slogan, Denis Kearney, is depicted on the Celluloid collars and cuffs card as the mustached man in profile swimming in the ocean.
To Consider:
- What accounts for the reason why Asian countries were generally viewed as favorable “exotic” lands, but Asian immigrants were viewed unfavorably as threats?
Key Card 4: Mikado Craze (1885)
By the Victorian era, assembly line industrialization made many goods more affordable and trade cards helped promote products like corsets to larger audiences. The Tricora corset was marketed as “waterproof, pliable, supporting and absolutely unbreakable.” Yet, rather than showing the corset’s construction, this card features three women dressed in traditional Japanese clothing to endorse the product.
Many would have recognized the women in yellowface from the satirical comedic opera, The Mikado, which was released to popular acclaim in Europe and America in 1885. During performances, the “Three Little Maids” take short shuffle steps and wave hand fans in a synchronized manner, theatrical inventions that became a visual shorthand for Japan.
These performances were also set within a world of Japanese fans, swords, and vases, making this imaginary Japan inseparable from the commodities it produced. For the Victorian consumer, Japan was not a place of real people, but a collection of beautiful objects. As seen in the photograph on display, Americans in “Japanese” dress reduced cultural identity into a costume
To consider:
- Why was it “fashionable” to dress up as a Japanese character, while the US government was simultaneously passing laws to exclude Asian immigrants from entering the country?
Key Card 5: Buddhist Vogue (1880s)
Boss Patent Watch Cases, known for making gold-filled pocket watches, commissioned a set of twelve trade cards bearing a constellation of Asian motifs. The cards were designed to be overprinted with a retailer’s name and address for use as business cards.
One of the cards incorporated a Laughing Buddha superimposed over a hot-air balloon. Despite the growing popularity of Buddhism following the publication of Edwin Arnold’s epic poem, The Light of Asia, in 1879, it is unlikely the Laughing Buddha was viewed reverently as a Buddhist figure. Statues of the Laughing Buddha, similar to the one on display, circulated as relatively affordable trinkets from Asia. Likewise, the second Boss trade card on display depicts several small statues of the Buddhist figure Bodhidharma, widely circulating in Japan as Daruma dolls.
Such images did not necessarily recall religious Buddhist practice, but more directly signaled commodities that could be bought and sold as emblems of the exotic Orient. Alternatively, when Buddhist statues were depicted as the focus of religious worship, they were often portrayed as dangerous idols. As seen with the other two cards on display, these Buddhist icons were depicted as demonic or as having exaggerated racial characteristics to identify them as foreign.
To consider:
- What happens to a religion when its icons become commodified “marketing mascots”?
Key Card 6: Globetrotting Asia (1890s)
The Arbuckle Brothers, renowned for marketing a variety of pre-roasted coffee beans, began inserting colorful trade cards into its packaging in the mid-to-late 1880s. The firm was among the first American companies to organize such cards into numbered series designed to form complete collectible sets. These included National Geographical World Atlas (50 cards, 1889), A Trip Around the World (50 cards, 1891), and Sports and Pastimes of All Nations (50 cards, 1893).
This emphasis on comparing and collecting cultures from across the globe reflected contemporary advances in travel technology and the opening of new international routes. The completion of the American transcontinental railroad in 1868, followed by the opening of the Suez Canal the following year, offered wealthy tourists unprecedented opportunities to circumnavigate the world in less than three months.
This card depicting Yokohama, Japan, comes from Arbuckle’s Trip Around the World series. Yokohama was the main port of entry into Japan after crossing the Pacific Ocean from the West Coast. The lithographer, New York-based Joseph P. Knapp, selected stereotypical imagery to depict the Japanese port city, including a juggler, a Buddha statue, and a kimono clad “Japanese Beauty.” The central structure, however, was not a hotel but the Gankirō Teahouse, an establishment in the pleasure quarter that served both foreign visitors and Japanese patrons.
To consider:
- What visual elements on this Arbuckle trade cards appear elsewhere in this exhibit?
Further Readings
Lee, Erika. 2016. The Making of Asian America: A History. Simon & Schuster.
Luo, Michael. 2025. Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Doubleday.
Takaki, Ronald. 2008. A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (Revised). Little, Brown and Company.
Keevak, Michael. 2011. Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking. Princeton University Press.
Lee, Josephine D. 2010. The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. University of Minnesota Press.
Moy, James S. 1993. Marginal Sights: Staging the Chinese in America. University of Iowa Press.
Ngai, Mae. 2021. The Chinese Question: The Gold Rushes and Global Politics. W.W. Norton & Co.
Schodt, Frederik L. 2012. Professor Risley and the Imperial Japanese Troupe: How an American Acrobat Introduced Circus to Japan—and Japan to the West. Stone Bridge Press.
Sueyoshi, Amy Haruko. 2018. Discriminating Sex: White Leisure and the Making of the American “Oriental.” University of Illinois Press.
Suh, Chris. 2023. The Allure of Empire: American Encounters with Asians in the Age of Transpacific Expansion and Exclusion. Oxford University Press.
William, Duncan Ryūken. 2019. American Sutra: A Story of Faith and Freedom in the Second World War. Harvard University Press.
Appel, John, and Selma Appel. 1991. “Sino-Phobic Advertising Slogans: ‘The Chinese Must Go.’” Ephemera Journal 4: 35–40.
Beckman, Thomas. 1996. “Japanese Influences on American Advertising Card Imagery and Design, 1875–1890.” Journal of American Culture 19 (1): 7–20.
Cheung, Floyd. 2007. “Anxious and Ambivalent Representations: Nineteenth‐Century Images of Chinese American Men.” The Journal of American Culture 30 (3): 293–309.
Matsukawa, Yukio. 2002. “Representing the Oriental in Nineteenth-Century Trade Cards.” In Re/Collecting Early Asian America: Essays in Cultural History, edited by Josephine D. Lee, Imogene L. Lim, and Yuko Matsukawa. Temple University Press.
Metrick-chen, Lenore. 2007. “The Chinese of the American Imagination: 19th Century Trade Card Images.” Visual Anthropology Review 23: 115–36.
Metrick-Chen, Lenore. 2013. “Class, Race, Floating Signifier: American Media Imagine the Chinese, 1870-1900.” In Race and Racism in Modem East Asia: Western and Eastern Constructions, edited by Rotem Kowner and Walter Demel. Brill.
Kim, Elizabeth. 2002. “Race Sells: Racialized Trade Cards in 18th-Century Britain.” Journal of Material Culture 7 (2): 137–65.
Kim, Sue. 2008. “The Dialectics of ‘Oriental’ Images in American Trade Cards.” Ethnic Studies Review 31 (2): 1–34.
Schröder, Nicole. 2012. “Commodifying Difference: Depictions of the ‘Other’ in Nineteenth-Century American Trade Cards.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 34: 85–115.
The Buddhas in the West Material Archive is a digital scholarship project that catalogues artifacts depicting Buddhist material culture for Western audiences. It’s comprised of prints, photos, and an assortment of ephemera and other objects. For a brief introduction to this archive, visit the main Buddhas in the West project page.
Personal Site of Peter Romaskiewicz 