Rose and Pollack’s Buddha Foxtrot Sheet Music

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The Buddha Foxtrot: In the late 1910s era of ragtime, Vaudeville accompanist Lew Pollack composed the novelty piece “Buddha.” Several bands recorded versions of Pollack’s composition through the 1920’s; it was a moderate success.

The sheet music cover shows an imaginary scene of religious devotion, incorporating a woman in traditional Japanese dress praying to a Buddhist image.

Lyrics were added to the musical composition by Ed Rose and the work was published in 1919. The song opens with the lyrics: “In an oriental clime, seated on a mystic shrine, Buddha dwells, and dispels hate.”

The song describes a woman who prays to the Buddha, pleading for her lover to return to her. This story reflects Giacomo Puccini’s opera Madame Butterfly, first performed in America in 1906.

I wrote a short post about the song and the imagery on the cover here: https://peterromaskiewicz.com/2019/01/09/the-buddha-foxtrot-by-pollack-and-rose-visual-literacy-of-buddhism/.

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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Olfert Dapper’s Formosan Buddha Engraving

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European book engravers often fabricated details to flesh out illustrations where textual accounts were silent. Such is the case here for “The Idoll Sekia” (Śākyamuni) showing a Buddhist temple in late 17th century Formosa, present-day Taiwan.


This illustration is from the 1674 German edition of Atlas Chinensis by Olfert Dapper (1636–1689). Dapper never visited Asia, but edited the travelogues of the second and third Dutch embassies to China and consulted Jesuit accounts.


The copperplate engraving were most likely prepared in the workshop of the publisher Jacob van Meurs. The image was based on Dapper’s retelling of the accounts of a Scotchman named David Wright who lived on Formosa in the 1650s.


Wright describes the use of music during worship and the prostrations of two priests day and night at the altar.


The main icon – never identified as the Buddha in the text – is described as depicting a religious man, now deified, who shaved his head and never ate animal flesh.


An English edition of Dapper’s work, published by John Ogilby in 1671, can be viewed through Stanford University here: https://tinyurl.com/ycyw93eb

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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Mott Street Laughing Buddha Postcard

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A Rare Buddha of New York: It was uncommon for early Chinese American temples to display Buddhist icons. Here we have the sitting figure of Budai, popularly known as the Laughing Buddha, shown in New York’s Chinatown in the 1930s.

Born in San Francisco in 1888, Poy Yee became secretary for one of the most influential tongs in New York, the On Leong Tong. In 1926, he opened the Chinese Temple at 5 Mott Street with this Budai icon.

The image is on a “real photo post card,” meaning the image was produced on photosensitized paper directly. Based on the design of the obverse we can tell the card was produced between 1939 and 1950.

Yee called the space a Chinese Temple, but the interior was not typical of a religious space. He housed additional Chinese exhibits and charged Chinatown tourists 25c admission.

The statue was made of plaster and painted a bronze color; it reputedly weighed 1000 pounds. Yee closed his Chinese Temple in 1947.

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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Jerome Camp Amida Shrine News Photograph

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Barbed-wire Buddhas: Buddhist objects were precious – and rare – at American Japanese internment camps during WWII. Here, issei Buddhist priest Rev. Gyōdō Kōno, stands in front of a small shrine to Amida Buddha at the Jerome relocation camp in Arkansas.


In February 1942, Executive Order 9066 was authorized, forcing the incarceration of more than 110,000 Americans of Japanese descent. Most were Buddhist. Japanese Buddhist temples on American soil were closed and only a few small religious items could be brought to the camps.


Often, items like shrines (butsudan), altar tables, and other ritual implements were made from scraps of wood with delicate care.


Buddhist rosaries (o-nenju), like the one held by Rev. Kōno, were important ritual items for the Jodo Shinshu sect.

After leaving the Jerome camp, Rev. Kōno relocated to Chicago and founded the Midwest Buddhist Temple which is still open today.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History owns one of the internment camp Buddhist shrines from Jerome along with other items from the internment era. The shrine can be viewed here: https://tinyurl.com/yvb3heut

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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Bamiyan Buddha Saturday Magazine Print

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The idols of Bamiyan? Western knowledge of Buddhist material culture in the 1830s was quite limited. When Alexander Burnes “discovered” the colossal buddhas of Bamiyan in 1832, he only referred to them as idols and believed was one male and the other female.

The Saturday Magazine was an illustrated British periodical to help educate the working class. Published during British imperial expansion in the 19th century, articles would often detail exotic locales for the enjoyment of readers.

The woodblock print here was based on Burnes’ early sketch included in his Travels into Bokhara. The woodblock would have been locked into a form with hand-set moveable type to create large quantities of prints with relative ease.

Damage to the woodblock could often result in imperfect prints. Here, we can infer a scratch in the woodblock disrupted the ink transfer to the paper. Better mass printing technology would be created in the coming decades.

As for the statues, canon fire broke various segments in the 17th and 18th centuries; this damage is visible in the illustration. The colossal Bamiyan Buddhas were completely destroyed in 2001.

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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Ueno Daibutsu Postcard

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Only the face of the Ueno Daibutsu remains in Tokyo’s Ueno Park. Toppled during the 1923 Kantō earthquake, the salvaged body was eventually melted down during the Pacific War.


Picture postcards are some of the only remaining images of the intact statue. This plain design on the reverse reveals the print was made prior to 1907.

Q&A) Note, there is no address on the reverse…so why is there a cancelled stamp on the obverse?

The caption style is strongly reminiscent of the professional Japanese tourist photography trade that grew steadily thorough the 1890s. Contemporary databases do not currently link this stock number and location with a known photographer.


Ueno Park is celebrated for its spring cherry blossoms, highlighted here by the hand-colorist who painted the trees pink. Q&A) The stamp and cancellation on the front suggest this card was intended for display in a postcard album.

After many years in storage in the nearby temple, the Daibutsu face was displayed in 1972 on the site of the original statue.

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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Hamburg–American Cruise Postcard

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The first regular around-the-world commercial cruises began in the early 1920s. The Great Buddha of Kamakura was an iconic stop on the long sea passage; its international stature as a tourist destination was equivalent to the Taj Mahal and the Sphinx.

Within a decade, circumnavigation of the globe by passenger liner transformed into a stalwart luxury industry. The Hamburg–American Line was one of the main companies in the inter-war period.

Passengers kept family or friends abreast of their travels by having postcards automatically sent from ocean liner offices around the world. Here we see notification of the Resolute arriving in the ports of Japan on April 24, 1934. Tours through Nikko and Kamakura are noted.

The photograph printed here depicts a seemingly orchestrated scene that highlights the foreignness and apparent piousness of the Japanese.

The travel and souvenir journal of Eleanor Phelps, who embarked on the inaugural American Express Co. cruise around the world in 1922, is held by the University of South Carolina, viewable here: https://tinyurl.com/avt4xt2p.

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Arbuckle Bros. Coffee Japan Advertising Card

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Vibrant Victorian trade cards stuck out among a sea of black and white advertising. In the early age of engraved mass publications, chromolithography ushered in a new era of visual media.

Trade cards were popular advertising materials from 1875 to 1900. Typically businesses printed text-heavy advertising copy on the reverse of the card, saving the obverse for an image.

Here, Arbukle Bros. Coffee produced a 50 card set depicting around-the-world travel. This trade card highlights Yokohama, Japan, a treaty port city popular among 19th century tourists.

In reality, the card shows stereotypical imagery of Japan, including costumes, landscapes, and professions easily identifiable to foreign travelers.

The Buddhist icon is unidentified, but this card reveals generic Buddhist imagery was closely connected to the popular image of Japan.

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Hyōgo Daibutsu Vignette Postcard

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The original Hyōgo Daibutsu 兵庫大仏 was dismantled as part of Japanese war efforts during WWII. It was motivated by the Ordinance on the Collection of Metals issued in 1941. At the time, it was the third largest Buddhist statue in Japan.

Constructed in 1891, photographs of the Hyōgo Daibutsu were often printed on Japanese postcards of the era. Based on the design on the back of this card we know it was published before 1907.


The blank space on the front of this card was intended for the written message. The reverse was saved for the address only.


This card is uncommon because it combines a collotype print with an added pink cherry blossom frame. The angular band of discoloration on the corner reveals it was stored in a postcard album.


Most photographic Japanese post cards of this period were individually hand-painted. This continued into the 1910s until multi-color printing became more commonplace.

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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Herbert Ponting’s Nichiren Priest Stereoview

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Is this the first stereoscopic 3D portrait of a Buddhist abbot? While many Japanese Buddhist priests were photographed for stereoviews by 1905, the year this card was issued, this is a rare occasion where we have an indication of the priest’s identity.

The caption tells us the priest is the head of Ikegami Temple (Honmon-ji #本門寺) of the Nichiren school. We also know the photographer, Herbert Ponting, was hired by H.C. White to take photos of the Russo-Japanese War and he toured Japan through the end of 1906.

There are two potential identifications of this priest, but it is likely Kubota Nichiki 久保田日亀(1841–1911), who became the 68th generation abbot in 1899. He holds a fly-whisk, a sign authority.

By the 20th century, stereoviews were seen as important educational tools and the backs of many cards were imprinted with information, sometimes reflecting contemporary views and biases. This description notes the Nichiren school emphasized “the most flagrant superstitions.”

Ponting would eventually author a book on his travels in Japan, entitled In Lotus-Land Japan, illustrated with photos he had originally taken as stereoviews. The book can be read here: https://tinyurl.com/hhzhsnm9

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