Pieter Van der Aa

Tokyo (Iedo): Panorama from the Golden Temple of Buddha Amida to Mount Takao. After Arnoldus Montanus. Key in French and Dutch.

At the beginning of the 18th century Iedo (Edo), present day Tokyo, was one of the fastest growing cities in the world. From 1603 Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa Shogunate, which began expelling the influential Jesuits and other catholic orders that had been expanding there throughout the 16th century. Foreign trade became heavily restricted; the British East India Company closed its factories in 1623 and by 1639 trade with Europe was entirely limited to the Dutch who were confined to the tiny island of Dejima off Nagasaki. In the mid 17th century the Dutch East India Company sent several embassies to Edo which in turn provided the material for Arnoldus Montanus’s significant work on the country published in 1669, and the main resource for the next fifty years.

In 1729 the prolific publisher Pieter van der Aa issued his monumental La Galerie Agreable du Monde, which included numerous views based upon the works of Montanus. Edo is shown as it was prior to the great fire of 1657 with the old city centred around the Castle of Edo (Imperial Palace). Numerous landmarks are indicated with particular emphasis on the many palaces that much impressed Montanus, and in the foreground is a tributary procession returning from the court of the Shogun (this tributary route to Edo was the only opportunity for the Dutch to leave their tiny island).

For more than two hundred and fifty years the Empire of Japan developed with little influence from the West. However by the mid 19th century incursions from the outside world could no longer be resisted, and the feudal system of the shogunate and Japan’s isolation came to an end.