Glover Garden

Glover Garden occupies the upper part of Minamiyamate, the hillside above Nagasaki harbour that became part of the foreign settlement after the port was opened to Western trade in 1859. The city opened it as a garden museum in 1974, bringing together three original merchant residences on their historic sites and several Western-style buildings moved here from elsewhere in Nagasaki.

The centrepiece is the Former Glover House, a single-storey bungalow with a wide veranda, stone-flagged floors and a Japanese tiled roof, built in 1863 by Japanese carpenters for Thomas Blake Glover. It is the oldest surviving Western-style wooden building in Japan. The neighbouring houses of the merchants Frederick Ringer and William Alt, both from the 1860s, show the same blend of colonial architecture and Japanese craftsmanship.

Terraced gardens with flower beds and fountains link the buildings and offer wide views over the harbour, the Mitsubishi shipyard across the water and the surrounding hills. Oura Cathedral, the oldest surviving church in Japan, stands at the foot of the garden.

Thomas Blake Glover (1838–1911) arrived in Nagasaki from Aberdeen in 1859 and became one of the most influential foreign merchants of the late Tokugawa and early Meiji periods. He traded in tea, ships and arms, helped young samurai from Satsuma and Chōshū to study in Britain, and was involved in the first Western-style slip dock and in modern coal mining at Takashima. He later worked as an adviser to Mitsubishi and helped found the company that became Kirin Brewery. His house remained in family hands until it was sold to Mitsubishi in 1939 and donated to the city in 1957.

Glover Garden embodies Nagasaki's role as Japan's window to the outside world, first under the Dutch and Chinese trade of the Edo period, then as a treaty port after 1859. The houses illustrate the life of the foreign merchant community and its links to Japan's industrialisation.

The garden is also associated with Puccini's opera Madama Butterfly, set in Nagasaki; statues of the composer and of the soprano Miura Tamaki, famous for the title role, stand in the grounds. Evening openings in some seasons show the harbour lights, part of Nagasaki's celebrated night view.