Glover Garden

About

Glover Garden, in Minamiyamate, Nagasaki City, formally opened on September 4, 1974. At opening it installed two moving walkways, 54 and 46 meters long, a rarity in Japan at the time. The site once belonged to Thomas Blake Glover and fellow foreign merchants Frederick Ringer and William Alt, who settled in Nagasaki after the port opened in 1859. It is now an open-air museum assembled from historic buildings relocated from around the city. Its centerpiece, the Former Glover House, was confirmed by ink inscriptions found during repairs to have been built in 1863, making it Japan's oldest surviving wooden Western-style building. The Former Glover House, Former Alt House, and Former Ringer House are all nationally designated Important Cultural Properties, and in 2015 they were jointly inscribed as UNESCO World Heritage components of "Sites of Japan's Meiji Industrial Revolution: Iron and Steel, Shipbuilding and Coal Mining."