United States

1876 Centennial Ivory Pagoda Print

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Lost Ivory Pagoda? Japan’s exhibit at the 1876 Centennial Exposition is often credited as inspiring American Japonisme. Less celebrated is China’s involvement who also made a splash with its exhibit, including an intricate 4-foot ivory pagoda.

The 1830s and 40s saw a handful of private Chinese museums open, but the Centennial included objects sent to the US by Chinese representatives. By plan, the objects chosen reflected the tastes of Chinese elite, including silks, porcelain, paintings, and fine teas.

The carved ivory display merited some of the most attention, especially a fenced-in miniature pagoda surrounded by fruit trees and figurines. The artist here, working for the publisher Frank Leslie, notes the name of the Canton manufacturer, Ho A Ching.

We are told the pagoda was priced at $600. Many items were acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, but I have not been able to confirm if its currently in the collection. A photo of the original pagoda can be seen here: https://tinyurl.com/mtkv2wzk.

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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Argosy’s Jungle Justice Pulp Magazine Cover

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Pulp Fiction Buddhas: When editor Frank Munsey switched to inexpensive wood pulp paper in 1896, his publication, Argosy, was the first of what came to be known as pulp magazines. With over 150 publications in press by the 1930s, cover art was a critical driver for sales.

Argosy often featured episodic action and adventure stories, here starring Gillian Hazeltine as a crime solving lawyer in Jungle Justice. The cover of Paul Stahr vividly portrays the tropical setting and captures the tension between the hero and villain.

A closer look reveals a mélange of visual “Oriental” tropes: a grotesque Tibetan-style idol, a Japanese torii gate as shrine backdrop, and a turbaned menace hiding in the shadows.

The text is equally stereotypical, noting the location as “the Orient” (we are later informed its Saigon) and the villain as the “devil worshiper,” the Sultan of Senang.

The idol’s face, likely intended to signal the Sultan’s devil worship, resembles a Tibetan Buddhist cham dance mask. Various issues from Argosy, including Jungle Justice, can be read here: https://www.pulpmagazines.org/the-argosy/.

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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World in Boston Missionary Expo Buddhism Postcard

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A Buddhist Object Lesson: Buddhist material culture was critical to the first US missionary exposition in 1911. Called The World In Boston, religious artifacts were employed to help give visitors a realistic glimpse into international missionary life.

An estimated 400,000 people visited the exposition where “Buddhism” comprised a modest court in the Hall of Religions. In contrast to conventional museum exhibits, a single Burmese Buddhist statue was housed in a small building resembling a typical Southeast Asian temple.

Inexpensive halftone printing allowed photographs to be reprinted as picture postcards, a very popular medium of the era. The image on the front bears only a loose resemblance to real Burmese temples found on postcards published by Philipp Klier and D.A. Ahuja.

On-site docents ensured religious icons were understood as props within a missionary narrative of attempting to save debased heathens. The American Baptist Mission in Burma provided some of the objects on display at The World in Boston, possibly even this enshrined Buddha.

For further exploration of the artifacts on display at the 1911 missionary exhibition, see Hasinoff, Erin L. Faith in Objects American Missionary Expositions in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 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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The Cheat (1923) Production Photograph

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A Lost Film: The remake of The Cheat in 1923 starred Pola Negri in her second American film; she gave rise to the cinematic femme fatale. As with many silent films of the era, The Cheat is considered lost and theatrical stills are some of the only pictorial documents remaining.

Theatrical stills – shot since the advent of feature films in the 1910s – are simply production photographs. Over the last century they have become highly collected artifacts, here we can see where the photo was affixed to an album page.

The image here shows Charles de Rochefort playing a cunning art dealer masquerading as an East Indian Prince. The set design uses a multi-arm statue to underscore his foreign, and potentially nefarious, identity.

Looking closely at the statue, is does not appear to be a studio-made prop. The features and style suggest an authentic East Asian icon.

The richly brocaded costuming hints at the character’s royal pedigree, while his posture of reverence reveals his non-Christian religious allegiance.

A similar icon was photographed by German photographer Hedda Morrison in China between 1933–1946. It is viewable through Bristol’s Visualizing China project here: https://hpcbristol.net/visual/Hv08-085

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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Paul Frenzeny’s Chinese Temple Print

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Chinatown Smoke: After completing the transcontinental railroad, many periodicals ran stories about the American west, including the popular illustrated miscellany, Harper’s Weekly. Images of Chinatown joss houses emerged as popular visual tropes for the semi-exotic frontier.

The illustration was made by Paul Frenzeny and the engraving was prepared by the talented Charles Maurand. Frenzeny went on a well publicized tour of the US in 1873, but this dramatic image was likely pieced together from older published images of Chinatown and hearsay.

The illustration was meant to be didactic and moralizing – the image was paired with another engraving showing similar “degraded” devotions in South American Catholic churches. The accompanying text compares the “superstitions” of Chinese American temples and Romish churches.

As Laurie Maffly-Kipp has explored, the focus on material culture – icons, incense smoke, enclosed spaces – tied together anti-Catholic and anti-Chinese sentiment of the period.

While unidentified, the main icon here is likely a poor rendition of Guandi, one of the most popular figures put on display in Chinese temples.

Maffly-Kipp’s article, “Engaging Habits and Besotted Idolatry,” can be viewed here: https://tinyurl.com/u3zc2nne.

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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Fresno Japanese Buddhist Temple Postcard

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First Buddhist Temple Constructed on Mainland US: Two Japanese Buddhist temples were dedicated in San Francisco and Sacramento by 1900, but these were old converted residences. The Fresno temple was the first constructed to primarily function as a Buddhist temple.

The Fresno Buddhist Church was designed by the Japanese immigrant Kuninosuke Masumizu (1849-1915), a temple and shrine architect. The three-story wood structure was built on 1340 Kern Street and opened April 8, 1902. Construction continued through 1904.

This postcard is one of a few remaining photographs of the original building, it burned down in 1919. This card was postmarked in 1908 and was printed in Germany, the leader in photomechanical postcard printing of the era.

Reports describe the temple as having a Japanese style. In truth, the style is rather hybrid, with upward sloping eaves on the roof and a temple-style gate for the front porch. Overall, however, the building could easily blend into the residential architecture of the period.

The Fresno Buddhist Church was rebuilt in 1920. This building was sold in 2018 to local Burmese Americans and is now the Mrauk Oo Dhamma Center. The Japanese Jōdo Shinshū congregation built a new temple that opened in 2022.

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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Andrew Marton’s Storm Over Tibet (1952) Icon

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Buddhist Demon of Shangri-la: Andrew Marton’s 1952 film, Storm over Tibet, utilizes Buddhist material culture to drive the Cold War horror-fantasy narrative. Filmed in part at Lamayuru in Ladakh, a cursed cham dance mask is a surrogate for the menacing antagonist.

Storm Over Tibet was a remake of Marton’s pre-war German-Swiss film Demon of the Himalayas from 1935. For both films Marton used documentary footage from the 1934 International Himalayan Expedition. Some of the same footage also was used for Columbia’s Lost Horizon in 1937.

The co-lead, Diana Douglas, holds the hand of a Buddhist statue owed by the prop department of Columbia Pictures. It appears to be an image of Cundī. While large Asian statuary was oftentimes created by studio prop departments, this appears as if it was an authentic, yet incomplete, Buddhist artifact. [Update: This is the Daoist stellar deity Doumu, related to the Buddhist Cundī]

Marton’s 1935 German film, Demon of the Himalayas, incorporating on-location footage is available on the Internet Archive, viewable here: https://tinyurl.com/253rhr48.

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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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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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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