Horyu-ji

The oldest wooden buildings anywhere in the world stand in the western precinct here: the main hall, the five-storey pagoda, the middle gate and part of the surrounding corridor. Prince Shotoku founded the temple in 607 and it burned in 670 according to the chronicles, so what you see was rebuilt over the following forty years. Tree-ring dating of the pagoda's central pillar puts the felling of that timber at 594, older than the fire, which nobody has fully explained.

The pagoda is 32.5 metres and leans slightly. Its structure, a central pillar that carries no load and floors that move independently, is the reason it has survived fourteen centuries of earthquakes in a country that flattens most things. Engineers still study it.

The Kondo murals were among the finest early Buddhist paintings in East Asia until a fire broke out during restoration work in 1949 and destroyed most of them. The shock of that loss produced the Cultural Properties Protection Law the following year, which is why Japan protects what it does today.

In the eastern precinct, the octagonal Yumedono of 739 holds the Kuse Kannon, a gilded seventh-century figure that was kept wrapped in cloth for centuries and is shown only in spring and autumn. The Gallery of Temple Treasures has the Tamamushi Shrine and the tall, strange Kudara Kannon.

Entry is around 1,500 yen and covers all three. Give it two hours. It is 20 minutes by bus from Nara, or a walk from JR Horyuji, and it is far quieter than anything in Nara Park.