Hiroshige (1797-1858) began the series with characteristic ambition, completing 42 of the 70 prints in 1853 alone. Then the pace slowed. The 61st print, depicting Buzen Province, appeared in 1854. Seventeen more followed in September 1855, and the final nine trickled out between the third and fifth months of 1856. A contents page, published last, reorganized the prints according to the eight historical travel routes of old Japan -- a final act of cartographic nostalgia. The publisher was Koshimuraya Heisuke, who released the prints in serialized form, building anticipation for each new province the way a modern streaming service drops episodes. A deluxe initial run featured bokashi, additional overprinting that enriched the colors and shadows, but the technique was expensive and later print runs scaled it back or eliminated it entirely.

Hiroshige did not travel to all 68 provinces. Instead, he worked from meisho zue -- illustrated guidebooks that catalogued famous places across Japan. At least 26 of his designs drew directly from Sansui Kikan (Exceptional Mountain and Water Landscapes), an eight-volume series written and illustrated by Baisao Shunko, published between 1800 and 1802. This was common practice in the ukiyo-e tradition, where artistic transformation mattered more than firsthand observation. What Hiroshige brought was his extraordinary eye for atmosphere: the way fog sits in a mountain valley, the quality of light on water at different hours, the tension between human figures and the landscapes that dwarf them. Each print chose the vantage point of a local -- not the grand panorama a tourist might seek, but the intimate view a resident knows best.

The series broke with convention in a fundamental way: it used a vertical format. Previous major Japanese landscape print series had been horizontal, matching the natural sweep of a panoramic view. Hiroshige's choice of the vertical oban size -- 35.6 by 24.8 centimeters -- was partly practical. The guidebooks he worked from used vertical layouts, making vertical compositions a natural fit. But scholars also suspect a marketing calculation: a vertical format would have stood out sharply on the shelves of Edo print shops, and it allowed for better binding of such a large number of prints into collected volumes. The result was a series that emphasized depth over breadth, drawing the eye from foreground detail up through layered distances to sky and cloud -- a format that would become standard for the landscape prints that followed.

Each print corresponded to one of the 68 provinces that had defined Japan's political geography since 824 CE, plus a single view of Asakusa Fair in Edo, the capital. That Edo print proved prophetic: it became a harbinger of Hiroshige's next and most celebrated work, One Hundred Famous Views of Edo, which he began while still completing the final provinces of this series. But the real significance of the Sixty-odd Provinces lies in what happened next. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 redrew every provincial boundary Hiroshige had documented. The feudal domains were dissolved, replaced by modern prefectures. The old travel routes were superseded by railways. The famous views remained, but the world that gave them meaning had been fundamentally transformed. Hiroshige died in 1858, two years after finishing the series, never seeing the full scope of the upheaval his prints had unknowingly memorialized.