The Ainu and Early Commerce in the Sea of Okhotsk

The fourth through sixth lines from the right record the subjugation of the Kugi on Sakhalin in the eleventh month of 1264 (the first year of the Zhiyuan era, marking the beginning of Kublai Khan’s reign). From the Yuan shi (History of the Yuan Dynasty), Volume 5.

The Ming court built an administrative outpost and a Buddhist temple, Yongningsi, in Nurgan (present-day Tyr), near the mouth of the Amur River. The Ainu of Sakhalin paid tribute at the outpost.

This early map of Yezo by the Jesuit missionary Girolamo de Angelis portrays Hokkaidō as an enormous island lying to the north of Honshū and close to Korea or northeastern China. (From Hubert Cieslik ed., Hoppō tankenki: Genna nenkan ni okeru gaikokujin no Ezo hōkokusho (Northern Exploration: Foreign Accounts of Yezo During the Genna Era) Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 1962).

Trade routes connecting Hokkaidō, the Kuril Islands, and Kamchatka in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Ainu regularly traveled as far as the Kamchatka Peninsula via the Kurils to obtain goods that they later sold in Matsumae, on the southern tip of Hokkaidō.