Japanese two-folds screen, Chinese merchants, Edo period

At the beginning of the 19th century, when the Tokugawa shogunate had been applying the sakoku policy for over a century, Nagasaki remained the only link between Japan and foreign countries. The narrow enclosure of the T?jin yashiki, reserved for Chinese merchants and adjoining the islet of Dejima where the Dutch resided, became the scene of these strictly controlled exchanges. Every year, Chinese junks docked there: they unloaded raw silk, rare fabrics, refined sugar, ginseng and medicinal herbs, then left laden with ceramics, copper and lacquerware. Confined for three to four months in this enclosed area, Chinese traders play a pivotal role, serving as necessary intermediaries for the Japanese economy and, conversely, supplying the Chinese, Asian, and sometimes Western markets with Japanese products, thus maintaining a vital bilateral link despite the political divisions.
It is in this context that this two-panel screen was painted, using mineral pigments on paper and set against a gold leaf background. The frame is made of black lacquered wood.
It depicts 18th-century Chinese merchants.
The first two merchants, richly wrapped in heavy coats, advance preceded by two gorals with dark fur punctuated with light spots. Gorals are mountain goats from Central Asia. It is a direct allegory of Emperor Qianlong's "Poem of the Blue Goats," which celebrates the sovereign fragility and controlled vigor of these beasts, symbols of the conquest of Xinjiang and the civilizing power of the Qing regime ("Remaining masters of the rock, these goats bend without ever bending").
Behind them, two other traders, their coats in brighter hues, walk alongside a child holding a lively-looking dog on a leash. The boy embodies the family transmission of trade and the desire for lasting commerce, while the dog, through its vigilance, recalls the contractual loyalty necessary in a strictly regulated exchange.
Stylistically, this by?bu is in the tradition of kara-e, a Chinese-style painting that experienced a revival of interest in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Produced on large formats like folding screens, it draws its subjects from the visual universe of imperial China: scenes depicting scholars, classical landscapes, symbolic animals, and episodes from mythology. Unlike yamato-e, which celebrates specifically Japanese themes, kara-e demonstrates a precise understanding of aesthetic codes, historical narratives, and social representations from the Manchu world.
At this time, we also observe a reinterpretation of certain motifs from the namban style—specific to the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries. The namban style, which had introduced into Japanese painting the spectacular image of Portuguese merchants arriving in Japan, with their costumes, boats, and exotic animals, is reinterpreted in a new context. The folding screen presented here, although fully kara-e in its pictorial treatment and its explicit reference to imperial China, maintains a formal and iconographic dialogue with these namban screens. The figure of the Portuguese merchant was replaced by that of the Chinese trader.

This parallel is not anecdotal. It reveals that, just as namban-e had been a way of depicting the novelty and importance of trade with Europe at the beginning of the Edo period, kara-e seized on the motif of the Chinese merchant to visually inscribe China's renewed centrality in Japan's commercial and cultural exchanges under sakoku. Their integration, therefore, stemmed not from a simple fascination with foreigners, but from a scholarly and economic logic: that of representing, through codified visual means, an outside world perceived as a legitimate source of commercial references. Despite the limitation, after 1764, to eleven Chinese junks per year, the volume of their trade remained three to five times greater than that of the Dutch on Dejima. Products exported from Japan were resold in China but also to Westerners. Developed by court workshops, particularly the Kano school, this repertoire then spread to the homes of merchants and provincial governors, eager to assert their success by acquiring pieces influenced by Manchu culture. Kara-e screens, which became symbols of prosperity, were a daily reminder of the delicate balance between the political isolation of sakoku and economic dependence on the outside world.
172,5 x 190 x 2cm