英文摘要 |
It became popular for the Westerners to travel in Asia in the 1870s, and several travelogues recorded the experiences of the Westerners’ visits of ancient temples in Kyoto. This paper studies four cases of travelling writings, respectively by Joseph Alexander Hübner (1811-1892), a former Austrian diplomat, Théodore Duret (1838-1927), a French merchant and a man of the cultural circle, Christopher Dresser (1834-1904), a British designer, and Edward James Reed (1830-1906), a British naval architect. When they wrote and published their books, there were neither handbooks for traveling in Japan nor books of Japanese art history or cultural history. Official policy of the Japanese government regarding the protection of ancient heritage has not been well established yet. These writings deserve attention because they demonstrate how the East Asian Buddhist temples were commented by the viewers from the Western World regarding the artifacts’ transformation of their social and historical meaning in the early stage of the modern age. The specific ways in which the authors recorded their observations of the artifacts throughout their journeys illuminate how the Western viewers perceived Buddhist objects within their context of knowledge. In the early Meiji period, Buddhist temples in Kyoto experienced a rapid transformation when they became objects viewed with aesthetic or historical interest from peoples of different cultural backgrounds. |