Chinese Men

In this print the persons, identified as “Qing Dynasty Men,” stand before a partially unrolled handscroll that bears a list of foreign words. The vocabulary lesson gives basic words referring to people, such as man, woman, father, mother, young, and old. These words appear in the same format as Foreign Words: Dutch by Utagawa Yoshiiku (1833–1904), displayed nearby, with the Japanese in the upper portion and the Dutch equivalent given phonetically in a Japanese script below. Even though the subject of the print is Chinese, Dutch words were listed here because Dutch was the common language of the treaty ports at that time.