SieboldHuis Leiden: How Japan Came to the Rapenburg

The SieboldHuis is a museum at Rapenburg 19, in the house where a German physician first showed Leiden a Japan most of Europe was not allowed to see. The collection is inside. The story starts on the canal.

Japan Museum SieboldHuis sits at Rapenburg 19, in a canal house Philipp Franz von Siebold bought to display what he brought back from Japan. He was born in Würzburg on 17 February 1796, trained as a physician, and entered Dutch service in 1822. In 1823 he was posted to Dejima, the Dutch trading post in Nagasaki harbour. He stayed six years, assembled one of Europe's first great Japanese collections, and left under arrest. The museum opened in the house in 2005. Entry is charged; the facade, the canal and the walk past it are free.

The island that was the door

Japan was sealed. Foreigners were forbidden, with one narrow exception: a handful of Dutch traders confined to Dejima, a fan-shaped artificial island in Nagasaki harbour. Onto that island stepped Siebold, a doctor with a botanist's appetite.

Medicine was the passport. Japanese physicians invited him to teach Western science, and in 1824 he started a medical school at Narutaki, which grew into a meeting place for around fifty students. He treated patients outside the island, introduced vaccination and pathological anatomy, and was paid in objects: household goods, woodblock prints, tools, specimens. The everyday things his patients handed over became the collection now split between Leiden's museums.

He also collected plants with the patience of a man building a country in crates. More than a thousand native plants, a small botanical garden behind his house on Dejima, a glasshouse to acclimatise them for Dutch weather. The Hortus Botanicus in Leiden still grows his descendants.

The maps that ended it

In 1826 Siebold joined the Dutch court journey to Edo. He collected plants and animals along the way, and he also obtained detailed maps of Japan and Korea from the court astronomer Takahashi Kageyasu. Maps were forbidden to export. When the Japanese authorities discovered he had one, they accused him of high treason and of spying for Russia.

He was placed under house arrest and expelled on 22 October 1829. He sailed with his collection, arrived in the Netherlands on 7 July 1830, and settled in Leiden. The maps are the part everyone remembers. The plants, the prints and the objects are the part that stayed.

The house on the Rapenburg

Rapenburg 19 is older than Siebold. Four fifteenth-century houses were combined into one residence in the early sixteenth century; later owners added the classical rear and the Wyatt ceiling in the great hall. Siebold bought the house and used it to exhibit his Japanese objects to the public. He did not live there very long. From 1837 to 1844 he let it to the student society Minerva, and in 1844 a colleague rented it.

The collection opened to the public in 1831, and Siebold founded a museum in his home in 1837. That small private museum eventually became the National Museum of Ethnology. The house itself has been a court, a museum for seven months in 2000, and since 2005 the Japan Museum SieboldHuis. Inside: maps, rocks, animals, plants, utensils, art, and temporary exhibitions. The permanent collection is the record of a man who turned medical favours into a country's portrait.

What grew in the Hortus

The plants took a different route home. Many of Siebold's living plants went to Ghent, but the Hortus Botanicus in Leiden received his herbarium and, in time, his name on a garden. The Von Siebold Memorial Garden there is planted with species he sent back, under a zelkova tree dating from his lifetime.

Hosta, hydrangea, azalea, Japanese larch. If you have ever grown any of them, you have grown a little of Siebold's Japan. The tulip story begins in the same garden, two centuries earlier and with a different man. Leiden's horticultural history keeps doing this: one small walled garden, several empires.

The daughter

Siebold left more than objects in Japan. His partner Kusumoto Taki gave birth to their daughter, Kusumoto Ine, in 1827. He was expelled two years later. Ine stayed.

She became the first Japanese woman known to have received a physician's training in Western medicine, and in 1882 she was appointed court physician to the Empress. She died at court in 1903. The book tells her story from the Rapenburg, where the father's house still stands and the daughter never saw it.

Practical

The house is stop 3 on the walk: Rapenburg 19, on the east side of the canal, a minute from the Academy Building. The museum charges entry and keeps its own hours, so check sieboldhuis.org before you go. The facade is free, the Rapenburg is free, and the walk past it costs nothing.

If you are doing the one-day plan, put the SieboldHuis and the Hortus in the same afternoon: the two halves of Siebold's collection are a ten-minute walk apart. The hidden gems guide covers the house from the street side, and the book covers the rest.

The full stop — the maps, the daughter, the garden that travelled — is in the book. This is the address. The book is the walk.