Collecting Asia: Popular Art of the Victorian Trade Card Companion Guide

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 broadsides, richly printed package labels, and colorful trade cards emerged as 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 imaginations, simultaneously perceived as a land of alluring exoticism and a source of threat.

These tensions come into focus through trade cards, the vibrant advertising ephemera of the Victorian era. These cards were inserted into product packaging 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)

Click to Zoom


Sapanule exemplifies late nineteenth-century patent medicines that dramatically overstated their effectiveness. Although glycerin—the only listed ingredient—is an effective moisturizing agent for certain skin conditions, the claims to treat diphtheria and rheumatism are unfounded.

As was typical of the time, the imagery on trade cards had little direct relationship to the products being marketed. Sapanule issued a five-card series featuring scenes associated with Japan, printed by lithographer L. Sunderland in Providence, Rhode Island.

The images were not original, however. The were elements copied from a series of engravings first appearing 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 on Japan, including Edward Greey’s 1882 book, Americans in Japan, also seen in the exhibit.

To Consider:

  • Two Sapanule trade cards on display replicate elements of the illustration seen in Greey’s Americans in Japan. Can you identify them?
  • How does the repetition of imagery across different media reinforce specific kinds of stereotypes?

Key Card 2: Japan Craze (1870s)

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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 issued by Bufford, Japan appears as a tranquil fantasy landscape framed by a gold-ink border that visually “packages” the country as a luxury object.

A Buddhist pagoda, seen in the top left, was a centuries-old visual icon for depicting East Asian landscapes. The pagoda here was copied from Aimé Humbert’s writings on Japan in the 1860s and depicts a building at Hachiman’s Shrine in Kamakura, Japan.

Likewise, 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 delicately wrought bronze sculptures, including egrets, as seen in the stereoviews accompanying this display.

Imagery of pagodas and egrets became common decorative motifs in American Japonisme, encompassing a period sometimes called the “Japan Craze,” which reflected a growing interest in a Japanese aesthetic influencing fine art, architecture, and domestic decor. This helped cast Japan as a land of refined curiosities and provoked mass consumption of everyday objects, laying the groundwork for early modern consumerism.

To Consider:

  • What challenges to cross-cultural understanding arise when a culture is encountered primarily through its commercial products?

Key Card 3: Chinese Exclusion (1882)

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Trade cards often promoted products for use in the home, such as sewing machines, stove polish, and quick-rising flour. Washing and laundry soap were also promoted as remedies for the burdens of household labor. This Lavine Soap card depicts Chinese men dancing around an oversized soap box in exaggerated delight—an image that appears playful, but reveals deeper racial and economic tensions.

During the first major wave of Asian immigration, Chinese laborers faced widespread discrimination that pushed many into self-employment, including operating groceries, restaurants, and laundries. Although trade card imagery often lacked direct connection to the advertised product, the association between laundry soap and Chinese laundrymen would have been immediately recognizable to an American audience. While seemingly light-hearted, this card speaks to the limited employment and economic opportunities for Chinese immigrants.

Moreover, by the 1870s, political leaders and labor organizers blamed Chinese “coolie labor” for declining wages, culminating in federal legislation that barred Chinese immigration in 1882. Other trade card advertisements suggested new consumer goods could replace Chinese labor entirely, echoing the anti-Chinese slogan “The Chinese must go.” This is clearly apparent in the trade cards promoting waterproof shirt collars and cuffs trade as seen on display. It is believed the originator of the “Chinese must go” 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)

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By the Victorian era, assembly line industrialization made many goods more affordable and trade cards helped promote products like women’s corsets to broader 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 robes to endorse the product.

Most viewers would have recognized the women in yellowface from the satirical comedic opera, The Mikado, which premiered 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 signifying Japanese women. The card here depicts a moment of Three Maids’ performative dance which was re-illustrated and satirized across a wide variety of Victorian advertising media.

The Mikado was also set within a world filled with Japanese fans, swords, and vases, making this imaginary Japan inseparable from the commodities it produced and furthering the Japan Craze. For the Victorian consumer, Japan was not a place of real people, but a collection of beautiful objects that could help create a fantasy land inside one’s private parlor room. Moreover, the Mikado provided Americans a reference to dress in yellowface, as is seen in the late Victorian photograph on display. Japanese cultural identity was reduced 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)

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Boss Patent Watch Cases, known for making gold-filled pocket watches, commissioned a set of twelve trade cards bearing a constellation of different Asian motifs. These were designed to be overprinted with retailer’s information for use as business cards.

One of the cards depicted 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, this Laughing Buddha is not treated with religious reverence. Small statues of the Laughing Buddha, similar to the one on display, circulated as relatively affordable decorative trinkets from Asia and were more likely placed atop a fireplace mantle than placed in a household shrine. Moreover, note how several slightly off-register yellow watches adorn the Laughing Buddha’s robes, turning him into a walking billboard.

Alternatively, when Buddhist statues were not treated decorative curios, but 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 devil-like beings or as having exaggerated racial characteristics, symbolic of foreign danger.

To consider:

  • What happens to a religion when its sacred icons become commodified “marketing mascots” or household decoration?

Key Card 6: Globetrotting Asia (1890s)

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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 found on this Arbuckle trade cards appear elsewhere in this exhibit?

Further Readings

Lee, Erika. 2016. The Making of Asian America: A History. Simon & Schuster. [San Diego Central Library]

Luo, Michael. 2025. Strangers in the Land: Exclusion, Belonging, and the Epic Story of the Chinese in America. Doubleday.

Okihiro, Gary Y. 2001. The Columbia Guide to Asian American History. Columbia University Press. [San Diego Central Library]

Takaki, Ronald. 1998. Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. Little, Brown and Company. [San Diego Central Library]

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. [San Diego Central Library]

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. [San Diego Central Library]

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.

[Digital Exhibit] Trade Cards: An Illustrated History–Highlights from the Waxman Collection [Cornell University Library]

[Digital Exhibit] Victorian Ephemera [Brandeis University]

[Digital Collection] Advertising Ephemera [Harvard Business School]

[Digital Collection] Patent Medicine Trade Cards [UCLA Library]

[Digital Collection] Victorian Trade Cards [Iowa University]

Thank you for your visit!

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.

Engraving the Grotesque Buddha, 1660–1850 Exhibit

The Buddhas in the West Material Archive pop-up exhibit, entitled “Engraving the Grotesque Buddha, 1660–1850” will be on display November 22, 2025 at CGIS S050 at Harvard University.

Introduction to the Exhibit

Through the 1650s Buddhist material culture remained an enigma to much of Europe. Yet, in the late 1660s, Amsterdam-based publisher Jacob van Meurs (1619/1620–c.1680) started publishing illustrated books devoted to China and Japan. These works proved popular and helped introduce Buddhist material culture to broader European audiences.

Van Meurs’ influence was substantial. The engravings produced by his workshop were widely reproduced in publications over the next century. Some illustrations continued to be reused well into the nineteenth century until the invention of photography and adoption of photomechanical reproduction finally rendered the illustrations outdated. Consequently, some of the images from van Meurs’ workshop exhibited a strong media echo for nearly two-hundred years.

Notably, many of the images of Buddhist icons and Buddhist monks were embellished, often veering towards the uncanny, ghoulish, or grotesque.

The exhibit will be comprised of eighteen prints published between 1665 and 1863 that show the lasting influence of Jacob van Meurs’ printed works on the visual literacy of Buddhist material culture in the West.

Selected Prints

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.

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1906 French Colonial Exposition Annam Pavilion Postcard

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Following the success of colonial pavilions at World’s Fairs, France initiated its own independent Colonial Expositions in the 1890s. In Marseilles in 1906, famous architectural sites from French Indochina were reconstructed, including a towering Buddhist pagoda representing Annam.

Jules Charles-Roux, organizer of the colonial portions of the Paris World’s Fair of 1900 and head of the 1906 exposition, showcased the pagoda behind the main Indochina gate. The pagoda was also set at the head of a replicated “Hanoi road” populated with real inhabitants of the protectorate.

Held during the height of the postcard craze, the exposition grounds opened its own dedicated postcard pavilion. While the cancellation is unclear on the obverse, this card appears to have been sent from Marseilles; its destination was Port-Vendres, further down the Mediterranean coast.

While often obscure in exposition literature, the “Annam Pavilion” was a replica of the pagoda from Tien Mu Temple, in the city of Hue, which was founded in 1601. The pagoda was a popular subject of souvenir photographs sold by studios throughout French Cochinchina, Annam, and Tonkin.

The following year, in 1907, Paris held another colonial exposition, but recreated a different pagoda to represent Annam. A photo illustrated book of the 1906 Marseilles Exposition is digitized by the University of Aix-Marseille, viewable here: https://tinyurl.com/mczsvn6s.

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.

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Tamamura Kōzaburō’s Kamakura Daibutsu Photograph For Brinkley’s Japan

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An astounding 400,000 hand-colored photographic prints were used for all editions of Francis Brinkley’s Japan: Described and Illustrated by the Japanese. Produced in Boston between 1897 and 1898, this work was the pinnacle of photographic book publishing at the turn of the century.

The photographs were imported from Japan from the Yokohama studio of Tamamura Kōzaburō, one of the most prolific Japanese photographers of his generation. He reportedly employed 350 artists for several months to complete the job, yet Tamamura’s name is omitted from the final publication.

Unlike most books of the era which used photomechanical prints, Brinkley’s Japan used mounted photographs. The Great Buddha of Kamakura was the second full page photograph, following Mt. Fuji, in the first volume, suggesting its perceived value in the American visual language of Japan.

Tamamura’s output was so extensive in preparation for Brinkley’s book, there was a fivefold increase in Japan’s photography exports between 1895 and 1896. This volume of work was achieved at expense of quality, as many of the color washes are pale and poorly executed.

While the number of one million photos for Brinkley’s Japan was likely exaggerated by Tamamura for publicity, this was truly an enormous undertaking. To view the first volume of Brinkley’s Japan held by the Getty Museum, see here: https://tinyurl.com/bddt5z32.

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.

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Henri Laas’ “Dieu des Amours” Advertising Card

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Advances in chromolithography in the 1870s and 80s helped flood America and Europe with inexpensive, colorful imagery. This had the greatest impact in advertising with the introduction of trade cards, often bearing humorous or provocative images to elicit consumer interest.

To meet demand, printers like Henri Laas in Paris, created series of stock illustrated cards which could be imprinted with a store’s name and address. The store Moreau-Gouffier, seen here, had a “specialty in shoes” and sold “articles for soldiers,” probably during the 1890s.

Stock imagery was often unrelated to the store, but instead drew upon popular visual motifs. Coinciding with the growth of trade cards, France experienced another wave of chinoiserie following the looting of the Beijing Summer Palace and creation of Empress Eugénie’s Chinese Museum in the 1860s.

Moreover, French colonial expansion into East Asia increased the circulation of imagery of the region and its people through the French illustrated press. Trade cards drew upon popular ethnic stereotypes, such as we see with the caricatures of Chinese clothing, hairstyle, and skin complexion.

This card is part of a set that tells a story, with each scene set around a particular Chinese artifact; here we see a highly-stylized statue of a buddha. In the story, two secret lovers approach the statue, presented as a “god of love,” to seek his help.

The statue mimics a buddhist icon, but is also racially stylized with mustache and queue. To read more about the Buddhist artifacts and the looting of the Summer Palace, see Louise Tythacott’s The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display (2011).

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.

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Fritz Kapp’s Lamas and Disciples Postcard

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In 1900, traveling to Darjeeling meant gazing upon the grandeur of the snow-capped Himalayas and imagining the inaccessible lands that lay beyond them in Tibet. Visiting Darjeeling at this time also meant having the rare opportunity to encounter and observe real Tibetan lamas.

Following the completion of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway in 1881, the first commercial photography studios opened in the region. As the tourist demand for photographic souvenirs soared, studios increasingly staged scenes of various “ethnic” activities, including Tibetan Buddhist ritual.

The original photographer for this shot was Fritz Kapp who ran a studio at Calcutta and Darjeeling from about 1888 to 1903. When the picture postcard format was first introduced to Darjeeling in the 1890s, they became a cheaper alternative to photographs and a highly collectable souvenir.

Driven in part by an anthropological mode of seeing and recording, staged studio photographs required appropriate clothing and props to clearly identify the “ethnic type.” Monk’s robes, mala beads, and prayer wheels all signaled the presence of “Llama [sic] priests” as cited in the caption.

The central figure, looking directly at the camera, holds both a ritual vajra and bell; he is also a real Tibetan monk. Historian Clare Harris has identified this figure as Sherab Gyatso, the abbot of Ghoom Monastery located on the outskirts of Darjeeling.

A November 2021 Sotheby’s sale of the original photo was inscribed: “Lama priests by F. Kapp./ Lama Sherb, Gyatso (front middle).” For more on the history of photography in Darjeeling, see Clare Harris’ Photography in Tiber (2016).

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.

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Keystone’s Kotte Temple Stereoview

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The Kotte Rajamaha Vihara was founded in the 15th century under royal patronage to house a sacred tooth relic of the Buddha. At the time, some considered this the holiest site in Sri Lanka, greater than Aśoka’s Bodhi tree in Anuradhapura and the Buddha’s footprint on Adam’s Peak.

The Cūḷavaṃsa, a Buddhist historical record, describes King Parākramabāhu’s construction of a golden reliquary for the tooth and annual festivals held in celebration. Unfortunately, Kotte temple was destroyed during the Dutch occupation of Sri Lanka, but was rebuilt in the early 19th century.

Marketed as education material, the information on the back of this stereoview offers a few generic facts about Buddhism. The unknown author also offers pointed criticism, calling the statues on the front “rigid” and chastising Buddhists for being “practically idolatrous.”

This stereophotograph was taken in 1900/01 and was incorporated into a 30-view set devoted to Ceylon. While the copyright is granted to B.L. Singley, the president of Keystone, this photo was taken by one of several unknown staff photographers scattered over the world.

According to lore, the tooth relic was removed from Kotte about a century after its enshrinement to save it from Portuguese looters. For further history on the tooth relic, see John Strong’s The Buddha’s Tooth: Western Tales of a Sri Lankan Relic (2021).

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.

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Chinese Buddhist Shrine in The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu (1929)

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This photo casts a rather uncanny site with unnaturally bright side lighting, awkwardly wooden human figures, and a very odd Buddhist icon. This is not a real Chinese Buddhist temple, but a movie set designed for a famous 1929 Paramount film.

The photo is from a series of stills taken to preserve the set design and layout for The Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu, starring Warner Oland in the titular role. This scene portrays the moment before that death of the doctor’s wife and son by errant British cannon fire during the Boxer rebellion.

It’s worth marveling at this franken-buddha. While silent films of the 1910s and 20s sometimes used genuine Buddhist statuary, larger props were made of plaster. The craftsmen cobbled together the face of a buddha, the body of a jeweled bodhisattva, and adopted a two-fisted meditation mudra.

The prostrating mannequins represent the doctor’s family praying at the family shrine moments before the altar is destroyed by a shell, crashing rubble on top of them. Fu Manchu swears vengeance in front of his dead family and demolished Buddhist icon.

Buddhist statues appear elsewhere in the film, but mostly as room décor signaling a curio Buddhist statues appear elsewhere in the film, but as one reviewer in 1929 describes, they are among “the appurtenances of Oriental diablerie.” The “all talking” version of Mysterious Dr. Fu Manchu survives today and is viewable here: tinyurl.com/r5d9h7e5.

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.

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Philip Klier’s “Scene on the Shwe Dagon Pagoda” Postcard

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Shwedagon Pagoda is the most sacred Buddhist pilgrimage site in Myanmar, thought to enshrine eight hair strands of the Buddha. Philip Klier’s photo, taken in the 1880s, shows the activities of both monks and merchants on the main platform in front of the pagoda.

Built atop Singutarra Hill in the city of Yangon, four main entrance pavilions on the cardinal directions lead to a spacious open court where vendors sold ritual supplies. Small kiosks with shade coverings can be seen on the far side of the courtyard here.

When German photographer Philip Klier relocated to the British capital at Yangon in c. 1880, he opened a studio just south of Shwedagon Pagoda. By the turn of the century he started selling postcards of his photographs, a media popular among foreign tourists visiting the site.

Klier’s name is inscribed on the negative with the title of his photo: “Scene on the Shwe Dagon Pagoda.” Surprisingly, the Shwedagon Pagoda is not actually in the frame of Klier’s photograph, it sits just off to the left.

In the foreground we see a Theravada monk sitting on the ground with an alms bowl.

The distinctive building in the back is a seven-tiered pyatthat, characteristic of sacred Burmese architecture. For more of Klier’s photography, see the digitized collection at the National Gallery Singapore, viewable here: https://tinyurl.com/mtd9y72x.

Several of Montanus’ engravings were copied into later works on Japan, helping shape a visual lexicon for Buddhism into the 19th cent. The 1669 Dutch edition of Atlas Japannensis has been digitized by the National Library of the Netherlands, viewable here: tinyurl.com/5n6kstfy.

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.

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Dreamland’s Japanese Tea Garden Pagoda, “Greeting From Coney Island” Postcard

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During the Golden Age of American amusement parks, New York’s Coney Island was king, sporting the trifecta of the Steeplechase, Dreamland, and Luna Park. Opening in May 1904, Dreamland advertised a “faithful reproduction of a Japanese temple,” attempting to pull customers away from its rivals.

The “temple” attraction was mostly bluster, but a two-story Japanese-style pavilion was built as a tea house, crowned by an additional four-level pagoda. Iconic in its own right, this pagoda is featured at least two times in this classic “Greetings from” postcard design.

Mailed from Brooklyn to Bavaria in 1912, this postcard was originally printed in Germany, the worldwide epicenter of postcard production previous to WWI. Note the stamp indicating the postage was affixed on the obverse; this allowed collectors to display the postcard in an album.

Based on World’s Fair amusement zones, the buildings at Dreamland each had their own architectural style to showcase their offerings: Canals of Venice, Coast through Switzerland, Destruction of Pompeii, etc. The pagoda’s distinctive features (seen in the “N”) identified the Japanese tea garden.

Luna Park, which opened the previous year in 1903, expanded its own Japanese Roof Garden with towering pagodas; this park’s pagoda is just visible in the top of the letter “E”. As new Luna Parks opened across the US, some added their own Japanese style pagodas.

Dreamland was destroyed in 1911 when a fire ripped through the park. An extraordinarily detailed map of Coney Island’s three parks c.1906 is available through the Library of Congress (Dreamland’s pagoda is in the lower right), viewable here: https://tinyurl.com/xvdtw8yt.

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.

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