Glover Garden

Glover Garden holds the houses that foreign residents built here after the port opened, together with others brought in from around the city, and is named after the Scottish merchant Thomas Glover, whose own house stands at the top.

Japan signed commerce treaties with five countries in 1858, and Nagasaki became a treaty port. The Dutch factory on Dejima, which had been the only opening for more than two centuries, was closed, and a foreign settlement was laid out instead.

Merchants came, and on the slopes above the harbour they built houses in a Western manner but roofed with Japanese tiles, which is what the buildings here still look like. Stone paving and stone steps from that time run through the grounds.

Thomas Glover built his house on this hillside in 1863. It passed to his son, then to Mitsubishi, who gave it to the city of Nagasaki, which opened it to the public.

It was made an Important Cultural Property in 1961. When it was repaired in the 1960s its date was established, and it was confirmed as the oldest wooden Western-style building surviving in Japan. It is also part of the World Heritage listing for the sites of Japan's industrial revolution.

Two more of the buildings, the Ringer and Alt houses, are Important Cultural Properties and stood on this hill from the settlement days. The rest were moved here.

In the 1970s the city gathered up Western buildings from elsewhere in Nagasaki and rebuilt them on the slope: a mission school, a residence, a restaurant building, and the seamen's lodging from the Mitsubishi shipyard. The plan was first called the Meiji village of Nagasaki; the name Glover Garden was chosen in a public competition when it opened in 1974.