AN ENTIRELY WHITE, perfectly-formed Mt Fuji in the background; a sketchy castle in the middleground, and in the foreground, the common people going about their daily business beside Nihonbashi – the ‘Bridge of Japan’. This picture of the Shogun's capital was how the woodblock artist Ando Hiroshige (1797–1858) started his series One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. These images – now considered among the greatest achievements of Japanese art – have shaped the way we view Edo. They show its inhabitants living a peaceful existence in often idyllic settings, with nothing ugly or unpleasant intruding.

In fact, the Edo that Mitford saw had been through the wringer. There had been a big earthquake in 1855 that had seen the destruction of 50,000 houses, although this was just a large-scale version of a routine Edo experience. More devastating were the most severe outbreaks of cholera in Japan's history, which hit in 1858 (both Hiroshige and the Shogun died in this epidemic) and again in 1862. It was not lost on the citizens of Edo that just before the first outbreak, the treaties between Japan and the Western powers, which opened certain Japanese ports to foreign ships, had been signed. The timing was a coincidence, but it brought home the fact that in the two hundred years that Japan had been closed to foreigners, it had been almost completely spared devastating diseases that other parts of the world were repeatedly exposed to. Westerners tend to look upon those Japanese who resisted the opening of the country as backward, ignorant bigots, and Mitford certainly did, but it cannot be denied that isolation had some big advantages.

Mitford, who in these early days was still not engaged by Japan, could not work up any enthusiasm for Edo: for him it was ‘another disappointment’ with ‘nothing grand or magnificent’. His attitude would change when he became caught up in the tumultuous events that were about to occur, and he began to see Japan as an opportunity rather than a series of annoyances. But at this time, Beijing was firmly lodged in his mind as the model of how a great Asian city should look.