Sazai Hall of the Five Hundred Rakan Temple (Gohyaku Rakan Sazaido), from the series “One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei)”

Sazai Hall of the Five Hundred Rakan Temple is a 1857 landscape print by Utagawa Hiroshige from One Hundred Famous Views of Edo (Meisho Edo hyakkei), the artist's most extensive late series. The Gohyaku Rakan-ji temple, southeast of central Edo across the Sumida River, housed an unusual triple-spiral wooden viewing tower known as the Sazaido. From its summit visitors could see across the river and back over the city, and the building became one of the most photographed (in modern times) and most printed (in Hiroshige's) destinations of the eastern outskirts. Hiroshige composes the sheet from inside the tower itself: a foreground railing or beam frames the view; figures pause to look out; and the city stretches away beyond the Sumida toward a hazy edge of Edo Bay. The vertical Edo ukiyo-e landscape print here functions as both topographic record and viewing-platform meditation, with the artist asking the viewer to consider what it meant to look out over the city from above. Published by Sakanaya Eikichi, the design belongs to the sequence of meisho subjects Hiroshige completed in the last two years of his life. The Art Institute of Chicago holds an impression of the sheet in its Clarence Buckingham Collection, where it sits among the most studied Hiroshige landscape prints in any public collection.