The Wave and the Tower
Brussels carpeted its main square in 750,000 dahlias to rebuild Hokusai's Great Wave, marking 160 years of friendship with Japan. The same fascination once paid for a pagoda across town — with a fortune pulled out of the Congo.
Brussels turned its Grand-Place into a flower carpet again this August 13–16, the 24th edition of a tradition it's run since 1971. This year's design, by artist Hiro Sugiyama, rebuilt Hokusai's The Great Wave off Kanagawa across nearly 14,000 square feet using more than 750,000 dahlias, grown in partnership with a flower parade that's run in the town of Loenhout for 75 years. The official line: it marked 160 years of friendship between Belgium and Japan, dating to the treaty the two countries signed on August 1, 1866.
The friendship is real — six generations of the same two royal families have kept it up — but the fascination behind it started with something more specific. At the 1900 Paris Exposition, Leopold II liked a Japanese pavilion so much he bought its entrance hall outright, shipped it to his estate at Laeken, and had it rebuilt into a five-story pagoda. Construction ran into 1904; the tower was inaugurated the following May.
What paid for it doesn't make the anniversary websites. Leopold ran the Congo not as a Belgian colony but as his own private property, and its rubber — quotas enforced, notoriously, by severed hands — made him one of the richest men in Europe. In December 1901, with the tower still under construction, he set up something called the Fondation de la Couronne: a legal vehicle that routed Congo revenue straight into Belgian building projects, out of parliament's reach. Historians tracing that money into Laeken's greenhouses, its pagoda, and the triumphal arch across town at Cinquantenaire call the resulting spree, per one architectural historian's account, a véritable débauche — genuine excess.
The tower's still standing, technically — closed to the public since 2013, too structurally compromised to let anyone back in. The flowers were never meant to last past the weekend.