Kyoto, Japan
金閣寺 · KIN-kah-koo-jee
A three-storey pavilion covered in gold leaf, standing in a pond that doubles it. A shogun built it in 1397 to show what he had become. A young monk burned it to the ground in 1950. What you see is five years younger than that fire, and wears five times as much gold.
Photo: Basile Morin, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons
You come round a hedge and the whole thing is in front of you at once: a pond, small islands with bent pines, and on the far bank a building that seems to be lit from inside. It is yellow gold from the first balcony to the roof. A second one hangs upside down in the water under it.
The pavilion was built in 1397. In China the first Ming emperor was near the end of his long reign, and in England Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales.
One ticket covers the whole route. No building is entered.
| Part | Ticket |
|---|---|
| The Mirror Pond and the pavilion | 500 yen, the one ticket |
| The abbot's quarters and the boat pine | Included; seen from outside |
| The spring, waterfall and upper pond | Included |
| The Sekkatei tea house | Included; seen from outside |
| The Fudō hall | Included |
| The tea garden by the exit | Green tea and a sweet, about 500 yen |
Ashikaga Yoshimitsu was shogun, the military ruler of Japan, at ten years old. By thirty-six he had ended a civil war between two rival emperors and handed his title to his son, so as to rule more freely without it. Then he bought this hillside and built himself a palace of many buildings.
This pavilion was one of them. He received the emperor here, and the envoys of Ming China. The Chinese court addressed him as "King of Japan", and he took the title, because it opened the China trade to his ships.
When he died in 1408 the palace became a Zen temple, as he had asked. Its real name is Rokuon-ji, the Deer Park Temple. Everything but the pavilion was moved or burned in later wars.
You cannot go inside. The path leads you round the pond, behind the pavilion and up through the garden, one way.
"It is six hundred years old." It was rebuilt in 1955, after the fire. The pond, the islands and the rocks are six hundred years old.
"It is solid gold." It is wood, coated with black lacquer, with gold leaf laid on the lacquer. All the gold together weighs about twenty kilograms.
"The whole building is gold." The ground floor is bare wood and white plaster. Only the two upper floors are gilded.
"Its name is Kinkaku-ji." Kinkaku means "golden pavilion" and is the nickname of one building. The temple is Rokuon-ji.
"The shogun in the cartoon about the clever little monk lived here." He did. The shogun who sets riddles for the boy monk Ikkyū in the Japanese cartoon is Yoshimitsu, and the gold building in it is this one. The real Ikkyū was fourteen when Yoshimitsu died, and there is no record that they met.
The stops follow the one-way path.
The pond is called Kyōko-chi, the Mirror Pond. It was dug shallow and wide so that the pavilion would be seen twice. The islands and rocks stand for the islands of Japan and for the mountains of the Chinese immortals. Several rocks are named after the great lords who gave them.
The best light is in the morning, when the sun is behind you. On a still day the reflection is sharper than the building.
Look at the floors one by one. The lowest is built like the house of a court noble, with plain wood and shutters that lift. The middle one is built like the house of a warrior. The top one is a small Zen hall in the Chinese manner, with bell-shaped windows.
Court, sword and temple, one above the other, with the temple on top and all three under one man's roof. Yoshimitsu had been all three.
On the roof stands a phoenix in gilded bronze, a bird from Chinese legend that appears when a just ruler is on the throne.
The path now brings you close to the back of the pavilion. The gold is leaf, beaten so thin that a stack of ten thousand sheets is one millimetre high. It is pressed onto wet lacquer, which holds it like glue.
The pavilion of 1955 began to peel within thirty years. In 1987 it was stripped and gilded again with leaf five times thicker than usual: about 200,000 sheets, twenty kilograms of gold.
Nobody is sure how much gold the first building wore. Before the fire it was dark wood with a few flakes of gold left on the top floor. Some who knew it thought the new one too bright.
Before dawn on 2 July 1950 a novice monk of the temple, aged twenty-one, carried his bedding into the pavilion and set it alight. The building had stood for five and a half centuries, through every war. It was gone in under an hour, with the wooden statue of Yoshimitsu inside.
The monk was found on the hill behind, having taken pills and stabbed himself. He lived. He told the police different things at different times: that he hated beauty, that he hated himself, that he wanted to be noticed. He was sent to prison, fell ill and died in 1956.
The phoenix on the roof today is a copy, but the old one survives. It had been taken down for repair before the fire.
Beside the abbot's quarters grows a pine trained into the shape of a boat under sail, its bow pointing west towards paradise. It is said to have been a potted tree of Yoshimitsu's, planted out after his death, which would make it six hundred years old.
Behind the pavilion the path climbs. On the left is a spring whose water Yoshimitsu used for tea, and then a small waterfall with a stone set under it at a slant. The stone is a carp. In the Chinese story, a carp that leaps the falls at the Dragon Gate on the Yellow River becomes a dragon.
Higher up is a second pond that is said never to dry, with a small stone tower on an island for a white snake that guards the place. Near it visitors throw coins at a bowl in front of a group of stone figures.
Turn round here. From the top of the garden the gold roof shows over the trees, with the hills beyond.
The thatched hut near the top is a tea house of the 1600s, rebuilt in 1874. Its name means "the place where the evening is beautiful": it was built for looking down at the pavilion in the light of sunset. One of its posts is the trunk of a shrub that almost never grows so thick.
The last building before the exit is a small dark hall to Fudō, a fierce guardian shown in flames. It was built in the 1580s and is now the oldest building in the temple.
| Year | Here | Elsewhere |
|---|---|---|
| 1397 | Yoshimitsu builds his palace and the pavilion | Ming China (1368–1644), the last year but one of the first emperor; in Scandinavia three kingdoms unite under one crown |
| 1402 | A Ming envoy brings him the title "King of Japan" | The Yongle emperor takes the throne in Nanjing; three years later Zheng He's first fleet sails |
| 1408 | Yoshimitsu dies and the palace becomes a temple | The great encyclopedia of the Yongle reign is finished in China |
| 1467 | Civil war begins in Kyoto; the pavilion survives it | Ming China, the Chenghua reign; Leonardo da Vinci is fifteen |
| 1950 | The pavilion is burned down | The People's Republic of China is nine months old; war has begun in Korea a week before |
| 1955 | The copy is finished | The Bandung conference of Asian and African nations; Disneyland opens in California |
| 1987 | New gold, five times thicker | China is nine years into reform and opening; the world's population passes five billion |
| 1994 | World Heritage, with sixteen other sites of old Kyoto | The Channel Tunnel opens; work starts on the Three Gorges Dam |
Films from official channels, played from YouTube. Nothing is loaded until you press play.
These are stories people tell about this place. They are legends, not history, and each one says where it comes from.
The upper pond never dries, even in the worst drought, because a white snake lives in it. The lords of the hill before Yoshimitsu prayed to it for rain, and the small stone tower on the island is its house.
Source: Temple tradition
A carp that swims up the waterfall becomes a dragon. The stone under the falls is a carp caught at the moment of its leap.
Source: The Chinese story of the Dragon Gate, told of this garden since the Muromachi period
The shogun pointed to a tiger painted on a screen and ordered the boy monk Ikkyū to tie it up. Ikkyū took a rope, stood in front of the screen and said: "I am ready. Will someone please drive it out?"
Source: Ikkyū-banashi, tales printed in the seventeenth century
The image in the last hall was carved from stone by the monk Kūkai, eight hundred years before the hall was built, and has power over diseases of the eye. It is shown only twice a year.
Source: Temple tradition
Later, people who live here will be able to add the stories they grew up with, and say which of these they have heard.
Last checked 2026-11-12. The temple's page on the site of its parent temple (shokoku-ji.jp/en/kinkakuji) for the opening hours, as shown in November 2026; the fee as posted at the gate and reported by visitors in 2026.
Checked 2026-11-12
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