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The mirror at Ise is in fact the mirror of the great Japanese sun goddess, Amaterasu. By ancient tradition, at the dawn of time Amaterasu ordered her grandson to descend from Heaven to rule over Japan, and to help him in this imperial task she gave him a sacred mirror that would give him and his successors perpetual access to the divine sun. To this day the sacred mirror of Amaterasu is used in the enthronement ceremonies of the Japanese emperor.

It is this particular ability of Japanese mirrors to allow humans to speak to gods that has ensured the survival of our mirror, which with eighteen others was given to the British Museum in 1927. All these mirrors are made of bronze and all have the same distinctive matt surface. But it was only in 2009 that a Japanese scholar researching in the British Museum was – for the first time – able to tell us why all nineteen mirrors look like this. It is because all of them came from the same place – all were found in a sacred pond beneath the mountain-shrine of Haguro-san in the north of Japan. At the beginning of the twentieth century this pond was drained in order to build a bridge for pilgrims. To the astonishment of the engineers, deep in the mud at the bottom of the pond they found around 600 mirrors (ours among them) which over the centuries had been consigned to the water. The visiting Japanese scholar, the archaeologist Harada Masayuki, sets the scene:

People started to make pilgrimages to the mountain because they found the landscape quite spiritual and holy, a suitable abode for gods. For example, the white snow that stays for a long time had spiritual significance. So the pond itself became a centre of worship, and people thought that there was a god in that pond. There was a belief among the Japanese people that in order to be reborn you had to do good things in this life. It was probably an extension of this idea that these exquisitely made and expensive mirrors were offered, entrusted, to a Buddhist priest, as a sign of piety – to dedicate to the god so that the giver could come back to the world again.

So we can now make an informed guess at the entire life story of our mirror. It was made in the sophisticated bronze-casting workshops of Kyoto around 1100, to be used in the rarefied world of courtly ritual and display, an indispensable tool for any lady or gentleman to prepare themselves for an aesthetic public appearance. At some point its owner decided to despatch it, in the care of a priest, on a long journey to the northern shrine, and there it was thrown into the sacred pond – still holding within it the likeness of its owner and carrying a message to the other world. What neither owner nor priest could have guessed was that it would one day be a message to us. And like the ‘Great Mirror’ itself, it tells to a modern audience a chronicle of Old Japan.

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Borobudur Buddha Head

Stone head of the Buddha, from Java, Indonesia

AD 780–840

We are tracing the great arcs of trade that linked Asia, Europe and Africa around a thousand years ago. Through this stone head of the Buddha we can plot an extensive network of connections across the China Sea and the Indian Ocean by which goods and ideas, languages and religions, were exchanged among the peoples of south-east Asia. It comes from Borobudur, on the Indonesian island of Java, just a few degrees south of the equator. Borobudur is one of the greatest Buddhist monuments in the world and one of the great cultural achievements of humanity – a huge, square, terraced pyramid, representing the Buddhist view of the cosmos in stone, decorated with well over a thousand relief carvings and peopled with hundreds of statues of the Buddha. As pilgrims climb it, they are treading a physical path that mirrors a spiritual journey, symbolically transporting the walker from this world to a higher plane of being. Here, on the rich and strategically important island of Java, at the monument of Borobudur, is the supreme example of how the network of maritime trade allowed Buddhism