A Market in Mukden

Mukden — now Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning Province in northeastern China — held strategic and cultural significance as the former imperial capital of the Qing dynasty, and Yoshida visited during the politically charged late 1930s. This 1937 print records the commercial vitality of a Mukden market, its stalls and figures rendered with the observational clarity Yoshida brought to all his urban subjects. Unlike his landscape work, which tends toward stillness and solitude, the market scene embraces activity and human density — vendors, goods, and passersby — captured with a reportorial directness filtered through woodblock's inherent tendency toward the lyrical.