When King Edward VII Died... in Japan

Alberta Montagu in Japan, May 1910—the hotel, the shrine, and the telegram that changed everything

They had been having a heavenly time.

Alberta and George Montagu—she thirty-two, he thirty-nine, the boys safely left at Hinchingbrooke with Uncle Hinch—had set off in the spring of 1910 on the kind of journey that only the Edwardian upper classes could manage: six months across Japan, Korea, Manchuria, and China, with letters of introduction to ambassadors, railway officials, and Buddhist art historians, stopping wherever curiosity led them. They had stayed at the British Embassy in Tokyo as guests of Sir Claude MacDonald. They had lunched with Theodore Roosevelt’s sister. They had motored into villages where no European had ever been seen, and where, Alberta noted with amusement, her pale hair caused more sensation than anything else.

By early May they were in Nara, the ancient former capital south of Kyoto, surrounded by temples and tame deer and the silence of a place that had been sacred for twelve hundred years. The Imperial Hotel was full of English travellers. Everything, as Alberta wrote to her husband’s uncle back in Huntingdon, was wonderful.

And then, on the morning of May 7th, they arrived in Kyoto and heard the news.