Glover Garden

 

Glover Garden is located on Minami-Yamate hill in Nagasaki-city, and nine traditional buildings

can be seen at Glover Garden. Among these, the Glover Residence, Orto Residence, and Ringer

Residence were built during the settlement era and are valuable buildings that have continued to

stand on this land for over 150 years.

Glover Garden boasts a great location overlooking Nagasaki Port with Mt. Inasa, a landmark

of Nagasaki-city, in the background.

 

In 1858, the Edo shogunate concluded treaties of amity and commerce with five countries:

the United States, the Netherlands, Russia, England, and France, and foreign merchants

with dreams came together to visit Japan as it entered a new era.  Western-style buildings

covered with Japanese-style roof tiles line the hill overlooking Nagasaki Port, and these are

where the daily lives of foreigners from all over the world lived. “Glover Garden” is located here.

You can feel the history of Nagasaki from the end of the Edo period to the Meiji period in this

area, where the residences of foreigners from the settlement era, including the adventuring

merchant Thomas Glover, and the Western-style houses that were scattered throughout

Nagasaki-city are gathered.

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Glover Residence

Glover Residence is Japan’s oldest wooden Western-style building and is the UNESCO

World Heritage registered in 2015 as Sites of Japan’s Meiji Industrial Revolution

In 1859 an enterprising Scotsman named Thomas Glover arrive in Nagasaki and immediately

become involved in a variety of businesses. Glover operated a coalmine, founded the first

modern shipyard in Japan, supplied weapons to Satsuma clan in Southern Kyushu and

established Japan’s Kirin beer brewery. The Glover residence, built in 1863, evokes an era when

Western architecture and lifestyle were of great  interest to Japanese. Several other merchant

houses have been relocated to the Glover Garden, which surrounds the house itself, making the

area a pocket of 19^th-cencury Western culture overlooking Nagasaki Bay.

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Golver Residence is generally believed to have been the scene of Puccini’s opera, Madame

Butterfly. Inside the park is the life-size statue of the famous opera singer, Tamaki Miura, who

received international acclaim for her performance as Cho-Cho-san in Madam Butterfly.

 

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 - Nagasaki travel guide