Welcome to Kyoto

Kyoto was Japan's imperial capital for 1,074 years — from 794 AD, when Emperor Kanmu moved his court here from Nara, until 1869, when Emperor Meiji relocated the capital to Tokyo following Japan's modern revolution. For more than a millennium, every major development in Japanese art, architecture, religion, cuisine, fashion, and governance passed through this city. The result is a cultural inheritance almost without parallel: 17 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, over 1,600 Buddhist temples, more than 400 Shinto shrines, and traditions in ceramics, textiles, tea ceremony, flower arranging, and performing arts that have been unbroken for centuries.

Unlike many historic cities that were bombed into rubble during World War II, Kyoto was spared. The American Secretary of War Henry Stimson, who had visited Kyoto on his honeymoon and understood its cultural significance, argued successfully for removing it from the atomic bomb target list. As a result, Kyoto preserves what was lost everywhere else in Japan — a living, intact window into the world of shoguns, monks, geisha, samurai, and emperors.

Today we visit eight stops across Kyoto: from the world's most dramatic shrine pathway to a floating gold temple, from a bamboo cathedral to the kitchen of a city that invented Japanese haute cuisine. Along the way you will discover why the floors of a shogun's palace were built to sing like birds, why a 22-year-old monk burned one of Japan's greatest buildings to the ground, and why philosophy itself has a path named after it here. Let us begin.