Tokaido by Jian Li

Tokaido Screenshots

Description

The Tkaid was one of the Five Routes constructed under Tokugawa Ieyasu, a series of roads linking the historical capital of Edo with the rest of Japan. The Tkaid connected Edo with the then-capital of Kyoto. The most important and well-traveled of these, the Tkaid travelled along the eastern coast of Honsh, thus giving rise to its name, which means Eastern Sea Road. Along this road, there were 53 different post stations, which provided stables, food, and lodging for travelers.

The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tkaid ( Tkaid Gojsan-tsugi), in the Heid edition (18331834), presented here, is a series of ukiyo-e woodcut prints created by Utagawa Hiroshige after his first travel along the Tkaid in 1832.

The Tkaid road, linking the shgun's capital, Edo, to the imperial one, Kyto, was the main travel and transport artery of old Japan. It is also the most important of the Five Roads, the five major roads of Japan (Gokaid), created or developed during the Edo era to further strengthen the control of the central shogunate administration over the whole country.

Even though the Heid edition is by far the best known, The Fifty-Three Stations of the Tkaid was such a popular subject that it led Hiroshige to create some 30 different series of woodcut prints on it, all very different one from the other by their size (ban or chuban), their designs or even their number (some series include just a few prints).

The Heid edition of the Tkaid is Hiroshige's best known work, and the best sold ever ukiyo-e Japanese prints. Coming just after Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji series, it established this new major theme of ukiyo-e, the landscape print, or fkei-ga, with a special focus on famous views (meisho). These landscape prints took full advantage of the new possibilities offered by the Western representation of perspective, that Japanese artists had by now fully assimilated. Hiroshige's series met with full success, not only in Japan, but later in Western countries.

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