8½ Hours in Singapore
Kubota Beisen, a renowned Japanese artist from the Meiji period, only had a fleeting eight-and-a-half hours in Singapore. On the early Tuesday morning of 26 March 1889, Kubota stepped off the steamship Yang-Tsé at Singapore’s New Harbour. Singapore was the halfway point of Kubota’s journey from Yokohama to France to attend the Paris Exposition of 1889. At the ports where the Yang-Tsé called at, he would visit and make drawings of the botanic gardens, places of worship and other locations of interest.
Kubota’s travel narrative, ‘The Album of Beisen’s Travels’ (Beisen man’yū gajō), is richly illustrated with woodblock prints based on these drawings. With such a short time in Singapore, Kubota had to travel and sketch quickly. Despite the brevity of his visit—and as a testament to the artist’s abilities and keen observation—Kubota would produce 12 woodblock prints that deftly capture the unique scenes of the wildlife and people of Singapore. Beyond their artistic allure, these 12 prints contain some of the earliest depictions of a tiger and a sawfish in Singapore.
This book reproduces Kubota’s woodblock prints of Singapore and provides translations to the relevant portions of his narrative to make his work more accessible to a wider audience. It also brings Kubota’s work into conversation with other contemporary sources to present a refreshing glimpse of the island’s cultural, historical and environmental landscapes at the turn of the century, a time marked by significant changes and transitions in the port city.
