The Buddha That Nearly Bankrupted Japan

The First Permanent Capital Before 710, the Japanese capital moved on the death of each emperor. Heijō-kyō — Nara — was the first intended to be permanent, and it was laid out on a grid modelled on the Tang Chinese capital of Chang'an: a rectangular plan, a great avenue running south from the palace, wards numbered in sequence.

That borrowing is the theme of the whole period. Japan in the eighth century was systematically importing Chinese models of government, law, writing, urban planning and religion, and adapting them at speed. The legal codes, the provincial administration and the tax system all date from this effort.

The capital lasted seventy-four years, which by the standards of what came before is permanence and by any other standard is not. The palace site is now a wide open field with a few reconstructed buildings, which is an oddly moving place to stand.

The Plague In the 730s a smallpox epidemic swept Japan, and the mortality was catastrophic — modern estimates commonly put deaths at a substantial fraction of the entire population, and it removed four brothers of the dominant Fujiwara family within a year, reshaping court politics at a stroke.

Emperor Shōmu's response was religious. He ordered a network of provincial temples across the country and, at its head, the Great Buddha at Tōdai-ji: a colossal bronze image of Vairocana, the cosmic Buddha whose light illuminates all worlds. The theology and the politics fit exactly — a single radiant Buddha at the centre with provincial temples arrayed around, mirroring a capital with provinces around it.

The Casting The scale of the undertaking is hard to overstate. The image was cast in stages in a series of layers, consumed an enormous quantity of bronze, and required gold for gilding at a moment when Japan had no known domestic source — the discovery of gold in the north during the project was treated as divine endorsement and prompted a change of era name.

Millions of people are recorded as having contributed labour or materials. The eye-opening ceremony in 752 drew monks and dignitaries from across Asia, and the brush used to paint in the eyes, along with the ceremonial objects used that day, survive.

The hall that houses it has burned and been rebuilt twice, and the current building is smaller than the original — which is worth pausing on, because it is already among the largest wooden structures in the world.

The Storehouse That Kept the Silk Road The Shōsō-in, a raised log storehouse in the Tōdai-ji precinct, holds the treasures of Emperor Shōmu, dedicated after his death by his widow, and it is unique in the world. Not because such objects were rare, but because these were sealed in a controlled space and never dispersed.

What is in it demonstrates how far Nara's connections reached: Persian glassware, a lute with inlaid decoration, textiles with Sassanian motifs, medicines, masks, musical instruments, and documents. These are eighth-century objects that were placed in a storehouse and stayed there, and a selection is exhibited briefly each autumn at the Nara National Museum — which is one of the great annual events in the museum world and worth building a trip around.

Reading Nara Today The city is compact and much of it is walkable, with the deer in the park doing a great deal of the work of making it memorable. The thing to hold in mind is that these buildings were the instruments of a state trying to survive a catastrophe, and that the scale is a measure of how frightened people were.

Tōshōdai-ji, founded by the Chinese monk Ganjin — who was blinded and shipwrecked repeatedly over years of attempts before finally reaching Japan to transmit the ordination lineage — has a main hall that is the best surviving example of Tang-influenced architecture in the country, and it is much quieter than Tōdai-ji.