Botan Dai at Ping-yang, Korea — 朝鮮平嬢

Hasui traveled to Korea in the early 1920s as part of a broader shin-hanga interest in documenting East Asian landscapes under the Watanabe publishing program. Botan-dai (牡丹台), a wooded hillside park overlooking the Taedong River in Pyongyang (朝鮮平壌), was a well-known scenic destination during the colonial period. The print likely shows the forested slopes or pavilions of the park with the river visible below, rendered in Hasui's characteristic treatment of foliage and reflected water. The Korean subject series gave Hasui's domestic Japanese collectors views of unfamiliar scenery treated with the same atmospheric sensitivity as his Japanese landscapes. The composition reflects a broader genre of East Asian meisho-e produced during the 1920s, situating Korean scenery within the visual language of Japanese landscape printmaking.